““We learned about life as children and it is necessary to change the way we intellectually view life in order to stop being the victim of the old tapes. By looking at, becoming conscious of, our attitudes, definitions, and perspectives, we can start discerning what works for us and what does not work. We can then start making choices about whether our intellectual view of life is serving us – or if it is setting us up to be victims because we are expecting life to be something which it is not.” – (Text in this color is used for quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

In the course of writing this article – which seems to be turning into another online book – I realized that though I talk a lot about the importance of emotional honesty in my work, I probably do not give a lot of down to earth, easily understood examples of what the term means to me. So, I decided to start this Chapter 3 with an example.

It was focusing on the dynamic of expectations that was the key for me in starting to get emotionally honest with myself. Starting to understand the cause and effect relationship between my emotional reactions and my expectations was essential for me to start understanding why my relationship with life was so dysfunctional. I, of course, in my codependency, had swung between the extremes of feeling, and believing, that it was all my fault because of my shameful defective being – and being angry and resentful at other people, the system, something or someone external to my being.

The twelve step recovery application of the disease model in the treatment of alcoholism – the concept that I had been powerless over my past behaviors because I had a disease – helped me to take enough shame out of my perspective of myself to start seeing my life with a little bit of objectivity. The spiritual approach of the twelve step program – that there is a Power greater than myself that is on my side, The Force is with me – helped me to shift my intellectual paradigm enough to start to see life as something other than a test I could fail by doing it “wrong.” The definition of insanity that I heard in my first days of recovery – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – caused me to start focusing on cause and effect.

It was the concept of powerlessness that led me to start becoming empowered to take responsibility for my life. Instead of viewing life through a perspective that was black and white – either I had to be perfect or I was shameful – I was able to start to see what my part had been in how painful and miserable my life experience had been. How I had some responsibility – how I was creating cause in my life that had negative consequences – but that it did not mean that there was something inherently wrong with me. I started seeing that my relationship with life was dysfunctional, was not working, and that I could take some action to change that relationship.

Insane Expectations – Road Rage

The specific area that opened me up to a new perspective on my insanity, was starting to understand what my part was in the road rage I was experiencing driving on the streets and freeways of Los Angeles. Looking at the cause and effect relationship between my expectations and the rage I was feeling at all the stupid blankety blank drivers in Southern California greatly accelerated my process of becoming emotionally honest with myself – and opening up my mind to a Spiritual Awakening, a paradigm shift in consciousness.

“There is an old joke about the difference between a neurotic and a psychotic. The psychotic truly believes that 2 + 2 = 5. The neurotic knows that it is 4 but can’t stand it. That was the way I lived most of my life, I could see how life was but I couldn’t stand it. I was always feeling like a victim because people and life were not acting in the way I believed they “should” act.

I expected life to be different than it is. I thought if I was good and did it “right” then I would reach ‘happily ever after.’ I believed that if I was nice to people they would be nice to me. Because I grew up in a society where people were taught that other people could control their feelings, and vise versa, I had spent most of my life trying to control the feelings of others and blaming them for my feelings.

By having expectations I was giving power away. In order to become empowered I had to own that I had choices about how I viewed life, about my expectations. I realized that no one can make me feel hurt or angry – that it is my expectations that cause me to generate feelings of hurt or anger. In other words, the reason I feel hurt or anger is because other people, life, or God are not doing what I want them, expect them, to do.

I had to learn to be honest with myself about my expectations – so I could let go of the ones that were insane (like, everyone is going to drive the way I want them to), and own my choices – so I could take responsibility for how I was setting myself up to be a victim in order to change my patterns. Accept the things I cannot change – change the things I can.” – Serenity and Expectations – intimately interrelated

Expecting other drivers to drive the way I think they “should” is absolutely, incredibly insane. Talk about egotistical and arrogant. I, being an excellent driver myself (how many people do you know that don’t think they are excellent drivers?), knew how people should drive – I was right and anyone who didn’t drive the way I thought they “should” was wrong. I felt extremely, righteously justified in ranting and raving and cussing out other drivers – sometimes cutting them off and giving them the finger, while wishing I had a laser mounted on the roof of my car so that I could just vaporize them. Luckily, this was in the days before people started shooting each other on the Freeways, or I may not have ever made it into recovery. Actually, this was something I continued to do into my first few years of recovery.

Detaching enough to look with some objectivity at how I was relating to driving a car in L. A., allowed me to awaken to how insane it was to allow my emotions to be dictated by such a ridiculous expectation. Then I was also able to look at my emotional reactions and get in touch with how dishonest I was being emotionally in relationship to other drivers.

What I came to understand about my emotional experience of driving, was that one of two things was happening. One was, that other drivers were scaring me. The way they were driving – either too slow or too fast, cutting me off, swerving back and forth between lanes, etc. – was causing an actual fear of survival reaction. That kind of primal human emotional response that is generated by a sudden loud noise or any perception of a threat of physical harm.

When something scared me, and I reacted to the fear with anger – that was emotionally dishonest. I wasn’t owning my true feelings. In reaction to the jolt of fear energy that shot through me, I became the angry, self righteous victim of the other drivers “idiocy.” The reality that this happened almost every time I drove on the freeway, just proved to me how many idiots there were out there – because I was relating to the experience from a victim perspective. It was impossible for me to have any serenity because I was giving other drivers the power to throw me into anger – which often triggered the suppressed rage I was carrying at how unfair, unjust, and painful life was.

Once I started to look at what my part was in those emotional reactions, at how I was setting myself up with my expectations, then I could start to take responsibility for changing that which I have the power to change. I learned to accept the thing I cannot change – other drivers – and change the thing I can, my attitude towards other drivers. It was when I realized that this anger was emotionally dishonest, and what my part in empowering that emotional reaction was, that I was able to start taking back the power over my feelings that I was giving to those “idiots.”

After that, when something another driver did scared me, I would own the fear. I would say out loud, “That scared me.” Then I would say a prayer for the other driver. I would ask that the other driver be helped to become happy, joyous, and free (knowing that the process of them opening up to that possibility would involve having their denial ripped away so they were not so unconscious – a prayer both Spiritually aligned and humanly selfish 😉 – and would offer up the incident as an amends for one of the thousands of times I had done something while driving that scared other drivers.

(During my years pursuing an acting career in Hollywood – the role of suffering artist being perfect for both my alcoholism / addiction and my codependent martyrdom – I lived out the romantic vision of the struggling actor by making my living by waiting tables and parking cars and driving a taxi. Driving a cab for several years – often stoned – really built up the number of driving amends I owe. Seeing those incidents as Karmic – what goes around comes around – also played a part in helping me to stop buying into the belief I was being unfairly victimized on the freeway.)

The second thing that I realized was happening, had to do with fear also. This was the fear that caused me to try to control life. That fear caused me to be very self obsessed. I was getting angry because those people were getting in my way. The immature, self centered perspective of life which was dictating my relationship with life, caused me to think and act as if I was the only person who was important. I reacted out of an ego selfishness that told me these idiots should get out of my way because I had places to go and things to do that were much more important than anything they were doing.

This ego driven, self centered fear was directly related – both as cause and effect – to my unconsciousness, my inability to be present in the moment. I was always caught up in the past or the future, and related to driving in traffic as a great inconvenience that was slowing me down. (Which, also, sometimes led to me driving too fast and cutting between lanes.)

The society I grew up in taught me that reaching the destination was what I should focus upon, was the thing that was vitally important. I was always striving to reach the destination where I would be fixed, where I would be respected and loved. When I reached that destination (college degree, fame and fortune, the right relationship, the Academy Award, etc.) then I would live “happily ever after.”

I was forever in pursuit – either of the illusive “happily ever after,” or for something to distract me from, or kill the pain of, feeling defective because I had not already reached the destination. I was always bouncing between the extremes: trying to figure out how to control my life, how to do the “right” things, to get “there” – or working on going unconscious (with alcohol, drugs, obsession, rumination, food, whatever) to escape the pain of being “here.” Being “here,” being present in the moment in my own skin, was too painful because I had a dysfunctional relationship with my own emotions – and was carrying a ton of suppressed grief energy.

And it was so painful emotionally because the subconscious intellectual paradigm that was dictating my relationship with self and life, was insane, delusional, and dysfunctional. I could never relax and enjoy life (without some chemical help, either from a substance or from an illusion/fantasy about love or success that would affect my brain chemistry) because wherever my life was at that point – according to the critical parent voice in my head – was not good enough and was my fault, or their fault. I was always feeling like a victim. (Empowerment and Victimization – the power of choice)

I needed to start letting go of that destination programming and start learning how to be in the moment. To actually be present and conscious while driving my car. (What a concept!) To start relating to driving as being a perfect part of my journey, a classroom – a wonderful arena for Spiritual growth.

When the rush hour traffic was disrupting my plans of getting someplace by a certain time, I would practice my Spiritual program. I would take some deep breaths to get into, and conscious of, my body. Then I would thank the Universe for this wonderful opportunity to practice patience and acceptance. I would take some steps to let go of the urgency I felt – the inner child’s fear of doing it “wrong,” the feeling that the world would come to an end if things did not go the way I had planned them. I would remind myself that life was a journey, and that this moment was a perfect part of that journey. I would talk to my inner children and tell them it was okay – that if I was going to be late, that was a perfect part of God’s plan. I would let go of my picture of how I thought things have to unfold for me to be okay. I would affirm that I am Unconditionally Loved and am being guided on my journey.

I would look around me, to see if there was something the Goddess wanted me to see – and that perhaps, was the reason I was stuck in traffic. I would remind myself that it was possible that this delay was really a wonderful gift. That perhaps because I was being delayed: I would not be in a traffic accident later that day: or the timing would be perfect for me to run into someone I needed to see, that without the delay I would have missed; or something to that effect.

I would remind myself that I am not in control of life, I am not writing the script, so:

I need to surrender the illusion that I am in control; remember that I have a Loving Higher Power who is in control; and be willing to accept reality as it was being presented to me, and take whatever action I could to make the best of the situation – to align with God’s will so I could flow with the Universal plan. (Work steps 1, 2, & 3 – the dance of recovery.)

That action may just be to relax, be in the moment, and do some prayer and meditation (talk and listen to The Great Spirit – which can certainly include expressing my irritation for the delay.) The action may be to figure out an alternate route, get off the freeway at the next opportunity and take surface streets – but not with that feeling of life and death urgency, rather with sense of adventure. “This is an interesting twist, let’s see how this unfolds.”

I started to learn to take responsibility for my feelings – to own the things I have some control over. Learning how to be emotionally honest with myself allowed me to start becoming empowered to take responsibility for my life and stop empowering insane expectations. By focusing on letting go of the belief in victimization that was caused by my attitudes and perspectives – the mental level of my being – I could greatly decrease the feelings of victimization, the amount of emotional energy that was being generated on an emotional level. I still had some feelings of being victimized, but I could be nurturing and Loving in relationship to those feelings – and set some Loving boundaries with my inner children who were reacting out of the immediate gratification urgency of a child. (I am just going to die if I don’t get what I want!)

I learned to develop an observer self – a mature, recovering adult with a Spiritual perspective – that could tell the critical parent voice to shut up with all the shame and fear messages, and assure my inner children that everything was going to be okay because there is a Higher Power in charge of my life. (Learning to Love our self)

Twisted and Distorted is the Dance of the Emotional Cripple

“We are set up to be emotionally dysfunctional by our role models, both parental and societal. We are taught to repress and distort our emotional process. We are trained to be emotionally dishonest when we are children.”

Early in my recovery, it was vital for me to start realizing how emotionally crippled I had been by the role modeling and messages I had experienced growing up in an emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional culture. I had to become conscious of how dysfunctional my relationship with my own emotions was, in order to start healing the dysfunction in my relationship with my self and life.

The single most important influence in the development of a person’s relationship with their own emotions is role modeling. Mom and Dad were our primary role models for how a male emotional being and female emotional being behave, for how they relate to, and express, their emotions. (As well as for how male and female relate to each other.) The cultural role models that we were exposed to – through books, movies, television, etc., – play an important factor also, but our primary role models were our parents.

The direct messages we got – both verbal (big boys don’t cry, little ladies don’t get angry, there is nothing to be afraid of, etc.) and behavioral (punishment for expressing emotions) – and indirect messages (the ways we interpreted and internalized the behavior of other people – parents, teachers, peers, etc. – as being personal punishment, as being our fault) we got both from our parents and from society play a part in that development, but role modeling has the greatest impact.

“In order to find out who we are, we have to start being emotionally honest with ourselves. And in order to be emotionally honest with ourselves, we have to start changing our perspective on our own emotional process.

As a child, I learned from the role modeling of my father that the only emotion that a man felt was anger. From my mother, whose definition of love included the belief that you cannot be angry at someone you love, I learned that it was not okay to be angry at anyone I loved. That left me with very little permission to feel anything. That did not mean that I did not have feelings – it meant that I was at war with my own emotions, that I could not be honest with myself about having them. As long as I could not be honest with myself emotionally there was no way I could know who I was. Until I started owning the grief and rage from my childhood, the sadness and hurt and fear that I had denied all of my life, I was incapable of being honest with myself, incapable of knowing who I Truly was.”

I remember very distinctly the thoughts I had in one of my first AA meetings when several people at a podium spoke of being afraid. My thought was, “Who are these people – talking so much about being afraid. I was never afraid. They stuck guns in my face and it didn’t scare me.”

I did not have permission from my self to acknowledge that I felt fear, because I had learned growing up that real men do not feel fear. I was emotionally crippled because I did not have permission to own my fear – or my pain or sadness. I had no permission to be emotionally vulnerable – “weak.” So, like the manly man I was trained to be, instead of owning that I was afraid or hurt, I got angry.

The Truth, as I soon came to understand it, is that I had really been scared of everyone and everything. I was scared because I knew I was not perfect, and I was sure that other people would discover what a shameful loser I was. Scared that I would fail the life test – that I would never reach “happily ever after.” Afraid that I would never find someone to Love me. The little boy inside of me was scared that god would punish me for being unworthy – scared of being condemned to burn in hell forever.

While pursuing an acting career, I would pontificate to other actors, sharing my wisdom about the key to building a true character – which was to understand the characters gut level fears. I maintained that all people were driven by their gut levels fears, and that any other levels of motivation were in reaction to that level of fear. I was a very good actor. I could really make characters come alive because of my insights into the human emotional process. However, I personally was not afraid of anything.

Talk about emotional dishonesty. The power of denial is truly awesome. I could see other people with some degree of clarity, but I did not have a clear perspective of my my self.

What is so insidious about codependency, is that it is entrenched in our core relationship with self and life. The intellectual paradigm that determines our perspective of our self – and therefore how we behave in relationship to life and other people – is subconscious until we get into recovery and start becoming conscious enough to stop being the victim of false beliefs, of delusional and insane expectations. Until we start becoming conscious, we are powerless over our behavior because we cannot see our self with any objectivity. Since the only choices in the polarized perspective of life (that was imposed upon me in childhood) were right or wrong – and wrong was shameful – my ego tried to protect me from the toxic shame I felt at the core of my being with denial and rationalization.

To own the incredible pain and shame I felt at the core of my being, the self hatred I felt towards myself for being imperfect and unlovable, felt like a threat to my survival. So, my ego kept me in denial of any feelings which were not acceptable to the perspective of being a man I learned in childhood.

The subconscious beliefs that were dictating my relationship with self, told me that fear was not an acceptable emotion for a man – so I had to deny that I had any fear. My subconscious intellectual paradigm, the beliefs that were defining my relationship with my own gender and emotions, severely limited my perspective of myself.

As long as I had a distorted and twisted perspective of my own emotions it was impossible to see my self with any clarity. I was powerless to understand my self and my behaviors until I started to get emotionally honest with my self. It is not possible for a person to be honest in relationships until they start getting emotionally honest in their relationship with self.

Control and fear – thinking to avoid feeling

Attempts to control are a reaction to fear. I attempted to control life because I was so afraid. As I explain in my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, human beings have been doing life backwards due to a condition of reversity in the planetary energy field of Collective Human Emotional Consciousness. One of the effects of this condition, is living life focused externally – trying to control things over which we have no control – while simultaneously judging and shaming ourselves because the way we are living life is not working.

“I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control – other people and life events mostly – and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process – over which I can have some degree of control. Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional. It was very important for me to start learning how to recognize the boundaries of where I ended and other people began, and to start realizing that I can have some control over my internal process in ways that are not shaming and judgmental – that I can stop being the victim of myself.”

I had to deny any emotions that were not acceptable to my subconscious programming in order to feel that I had some control of my life. Since the only acceptable emotion to the definition of being a man I had learned growing up was anger – and even anger was only acceptable to feel in relationship to other men – I had to deny almost all of my feelings.

As a child I had to learn to disassociate, to not be present in the moment in my own skin, because the emotional pain was too great. The primary way I learned to be unconscious early on was to be in my head to avoid the feelings. Later on, I would use drugs and alcohol to escape being present “here” – in my body in the moment – but even then being in my head was my primary defense against feeling my feelings.

I would fantasize, intellectualize, and analyze. I would focus on something or someone outside of myself – and was always caught up in the past or future. I was not capable of being present in my own skin in the moment because it was not okay to feel my feelings. Because I was living in so much fear – at the same time I could not acknowledge that I felt any fear – I had to put a great deal of energy into denying that fear.

I would escape from my emotional reality by thinking about the future – creating grandiose fantasies of a positive nature (rehearsing my Academy Award acceptance speech, or fantasizing about the unavailable woman I was currently obsessing about) or of a negative nature (worry, impending doom, financial insecurity) – or ruminating on the past, either beating myself up for something “stupid” I said or did, or wallowing in resentment and self pity about how someone had victimized me. This is very dysfunctional because it generates more emotional energy.

“Worry is negative fantasizing. It is a fantasy that is being created in reaction to feeling fear. It is not real – it is something that is being created because my mind has slipped into the old familiar rut of right and wrong thinking. Worry is not a feeling – it is a reaction, an negative emotional state, that is created by the perspectives of a belief system that empowers illusions like failure. The sooner that we can pull ourselves out of that rut and start seeing the situation as part of a learning process – shift back into a recovery perspective – the less negative emotional response we will generate in relationship to the situation.

Emotions do not have value in and of themselves – they just are. What gives emotions value is how we react to them. We were programmed to react negatively to emotions and adapted defenses to try to keep from feeling emotional energy. Being in our head worrying about the past or the future, is a defense against being in our own skin and feeling our feelings. But it is dysfunctional – it does not work. Reacting negatively to our feelings generates more feelings. The more we worry, the more fear we generate. . . . . . .

When I catch myself worrying then I know that I am not being emotionally honest with myself. Worry is a symptom that tells me I am avoiding some feelings.” – Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility 2

In order to start getting emotionally honest with myself, I had to start becoming aware of the ways in which I was avoiding my feelings. I learned to observe myself so that I could be conscious enough to catch myself when I was thinking to try to avoid feeling.

I realized that any time I was worrying about “what if,” or fantasizing about “if only,” or obsessing about a woman or the outcome of a situation, it was sign that I was being dishonest with myself emotionally. I started to become aware of all the ways I had been taught by society to keep my feelings at bay. The ways I talked and thought that helped me stay in denial of my feelings.

“Emotions are energy. Actual physical energy that is manifested in our bodies. Emotions are not thoughts – they do not exist in our mind. Our mental attitudes, definitions, and expectations can create emotional reactions, can cause us to get stuck in emotional states – but thoughts are not emotions. The intellectual and emotional are two distinctly separate though intimately interconnected parts of our being. In order to find some balance, peace, and sanity in recovery it is vitally important to start separating the emotional from the intellectual and to start setting boundaries with, and between, the emotional and mental parts of our self. . . . . .

. . . . . . . I had to become aware that there were such things as emotions that lived in my body and then I had to start learning how to recognize and sort them out. I had to become aware of all the ways that I was trained to distance myself from my feelings. I am going to mention a few of them here to help any of you reading this in your process of becoming emotionally honest.

Speaking in the third person. One of the defenses many of us have against feeling our feelings is to speak of ourselves in the third person. “You just kind of feel hurt when that happens” is not a personal statement and does not carry the power of speaking in the first person. “I felt hurt when that happened” is personal, is owning the feeling. Listen to yourself and to others and become aware of how often you hear others and yourself refer to self in the third person.

Avoiding using primary feeling words. There are only a handful of primary feelings that all humans feel. There is some dispute about just how many there are primary but for our purpose here I am going to use seven. Those are: angry, sad, hurt, afraid, lonely, ashamed, and happy. It is important to start using the primary names of these feelings in order to own them and to stop distancing ourselves from the feelings. To say “I am anxious” or “concerned” or “apprehensive” is not the same as saying “I am afraid.” Fear is at the root of all those other expressions but we don’t have to be so aware of our fear if we use a word that distances us from fear. Expressions like “confused,” “irritated,” “upset,” “tense,” “disturbed,” “melancholy,” “blue,” “good,” or “bad” are not primary feeling words.

Emotions are energy that is meant to flow: E – motion = energy in motion. Until we own it, feel it and release it, it cannot flow. By blocking and repressing our emotions we are damming up our internal energy and that will eventually result in some physical or mental manifestation such as cancer or Alzheimer’s disease or whatever.” – The Journey to the Emotional Frontier Within

Someone could ask me if I was afraid, and I would respond, “No, I’m not afraid. A little concerned perhaps, but certainly not afraid.” Saying, “I am feeling some fear.” is a quite different energetic experience from saying, “I am a bit apprehensive.” Naming and claiming the feeling is an important part of emotional honesty. There is power in the way we express ourselves. It is very important to start becoming aware of the emotional energy in our bodies. In order to be present in our own skins in the moment, it is necessary to be consciously in touch with our feelings.

There was no way that I could start changing the way I was relating to life until I started to own my fear. Fear is not a bad thing – just as sadness, pain, and anger are not negative or bad in and of themselves. Emotions are a vital part of our being that need to be owned, honored, and respected. Denial and repression of emotions is what leads to negative consequences.

“Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be – even those emotions that feel uncomfortable. Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing. These are not negative emotional responses! We were taught to react negatively to them. It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion.”

Human beings have a fear of the unknown for a reason. It is part of our survival programming. Because I did not have permission to own my fear, I was very out of balance emotionally. It was impossible for me to own that I had fear and still feel that I had worth as a man, so the only options I had – according to the subconscious programming of my childhood – were to deny my fear or feel that I was defective as a man.

“Fear is an emotion that exists to serve us. It provides a warning system to help us be aware of potential danger. It is appropriate and healthy to be aware when we are driving. To be conscious of potential threats. It is important for us to be in touch with our fear so that we can pay attention to it when it sends us a message.

What is not functional is to completely empower fear or to deny it. The 1 or 10 extremes of the disease.

Emotions are an incredibly powerful and important part of this experience we are having of being human. Emotions are a vital part of our being – and dictate the quality of our life experience.

“Emotions have two vitally important purposes for human beings. Emotions are a form of communication. Our feelings are one of the means by which we define ourselves. The interaction of our intellect and our emotions determines how we relate to ourselves.

Our emotional energy is also the fuel that propels us down the pathways of our life journey. E-motions are the orchestra that provide the music for our individual dances – that dictate the rhythmic flow and movement of our human dance. Our feelings help us to define ourselves and then provide the combustible fuel that dictates the speed and direction of our motion – rather we are flowing with it or damming it up within ourselves. . . . . . .

. . . . there are two primary transformers from which emotional energy is generated. Our ego self and our Spiritual Self. Our ego was traumatized in childhood and programmed very dysfunctionally. The ego is the seat of the disease of codependence.” – Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility 2

The ego is the part of us that composed the score and conducts the music for our dance of codependence. It composed that score based upon the definitions, attitudes and beliefs it adapted in early childhood due to what our emotional experience of being a human child felt like.” – Newsletter part 2 May 2001 Update

Denying my fear was dysfunctional and emotionally dishonest. Focusing on fear, giving it a great deal of power, is also dysfunctional – and can be immobilizing. The extremes of the disease of codependency.

In writing the May 2001 Joy2MeU Update just quoted, I shared how I caught myself making a statement that set off alarm bells in my codependency control center – my observer self. Observing and listening to myself made me aware that my fear of intimacy issues were up to be looked at again. I subsequently did 3 Newsletter web pages of processing about those issues (and another 3 pages in my journal pages of the Joy2MeU Journal) in which I uncovered a level where I was being emotionally dishonest with myself – and was empowering some black and white thinking.

Recovery is on an ongoing process of uncovering, discovering, and recovering. We have layer upon layer of wounding – which means layer upon layer of denial, emotional dishonesty, and rationalized perspectives. We keep peeling another layer of the onion and getting to a deeper level of honesty – both intellectually and emotionally.

June 3rd will mark the 16th anniversary of my codependency recovery. (I write this some time ago – my anniversary is June 3rd 1986: The Story of Joy to You & Me) There are still times when I find the process irritating. But the benefits have been incredible. It is through healing my relationship with my self that I have found an incredible inner peace. That I have learned to be present in the moment – and have some moments of Joy – every day. Recovery works.

Focusing on the future or the past, blaming them or blaming me, underreacting or overreacting (stuffing my feelings until they exploded forth in ways that made me feel crazy and ashamed,) feeling triumphant over “winning” or wanting to die because I was such a loser, were the rhythms of my dance of codependency. As long as I was in denial and unconsciously reacting to life I was doomed to “keep doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.” Unconsciousness doomed me to ride on a merry go round of cause and effect – never getting anywhere different emotionally. As long as I was incapable of being emotionally honest with myself, I was doomed to keep repeating the patterns that dictated my emotional reality.

May 27th, 2017 – I have decided to cancel the planned trip to the UK for October.As we were closing in on finalizing the plans for my trip there, a major change took place in my life as I got custody of my 12 year old grandson.At first it wasn’t clear if he would be living with me in the fall or not, so I pushed the trip back from September to October based on the possibility that he would still be with me.Since then it has become clear that he will be living with me – and that taking an 8 or 10 day trip to UK would present significant challenges in getting taking care of him during that time covered.If we would have had people signing up for the retreat and putting down deposits in the over 2 weeks since we posted the page, that could have impacted this decision.But since no one has signed up, it seems as if it is part of the Divine Plan to go ahead with the cancelation. Hopefully we can make this trip to the UK happen at some point in the not too distant future.Maybe even next summer and I can bring my grandson along.

Robert Burney Trip to UK 2017

Robert Burney is an author, spiritual teacher and counselor. His first book “Codependence – The Dance of Wounded Souls” has been called “one of the truly transformational works of our time” and he has been referred to as “a metaphysical Stephen Hawking.” He is a counselor /coach and Spiritual Teacher whose work has been compared to John Bradshaw’s “except much more spiritual” and described as “taking inner child healing to a new level.” His book “The Dance” is an insightful, clearly written narrative that has helped countless people to understand and heal from the shortcomings of their relationships with self and others. Robert’s work resonates strongly with those that have been fortunate enough to come across it.

Codependency Recovery / Inner Child Healing Formula

A pioneer in the realm of codependency recovery and inner child healing, Robert discovered and developed a pioneering holistic approach to codependency recovery – an inner child healing paradigm – that offers a powerful, life changing formula for integrating Love, Spiritual Truth, and intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into one’s emotional experience of life – a blueprint for individuals to transform their core relationship with self and life.

This blueprint can be invaluable to people just starting the recovery / healing process, and is often the missing piece that people who have been healing / recovering / on a spiritual path for decades have been seeking. What is unique about the approach is that all of the tools are brought together in a focused system for achieving integration and balance – and even someone who has a very good therapist (or is a very good therapist) right now, can still find it very beneficial to attend one of his workshops.

Creating the Possibility of bringing Robert Burney to the UK

Robert Burney

In order to share his experience, strength and hope – and teach others his integration formula – Robert has offered intensive workshops and retreats in the US, Canada, and twice on the Spanish Island of Ibiza, as well as on cruises in the Caribbean. In spite of having a healthy following in the United Kingdom Robert has not physically presented his work in a similar fashion.

Several years ago Angel Morrison (who had both attended a retreat in Ibiza and been on a cruise with Robert) suggested the idea of working to bring Robert Burney to the UK. Angel understood the importance of expanding the knowledge of Robert’s work. Rachel Hawadi who had read Robert’s work (and done phone counseling with him) agreed and the two agreed to volunteer and commit to making this a reality. This has then given birth to a Facebook Group which aims “To make the possibility of bringing Robert Burney to the UK” in 2017.

As of February 14th, 2017, initial plans are being formulated. The goal is to make this trip happen in September 2017. This page is being created to survey people who might be interested in meeting and/or attending an appearance by Robert, to ascertain what formats people would like to have available and where it would be best to offer these opportunities.

Location

It is assumed that London would be one of the locations – and both Birmingham and Nottingham have been proposed by people interested. Email us to let us know if you could attend in London or want to suggest another location in the UK.

Formats

In order to make the best use of Robert’s time the following mixture of sessions could be offered during the tour.

1 to 1 sessions: These could either be face to face/Telephone and Skype sessions for those in the UK. Depending on availability these can be 1 hour sessions. Given that the unique selling point of this tour is being able to see Robert face to face it would seem that a “face to face” would be the main offering.

Weekend Retreat: A residential retreat in a comfortable, peaceful setting starting on Friday with a 6:30 arrival, dinner and a session until 10 pm. An intensive session on Saturday which would end on Sunday around 4 pm. It would be important to ensure that those attending have excellent food and a general feeling of being cared for.

5-day Retreat: A transformative retreat for those needing a radical overhaul in a similar setting as the weekend retreat but going deeper with more workshops, 1 to 1 sessions. The setting will also be comfortable and nurturing. There should be an additional offering of holistic therapies e.g. massages, reflexology, yoga, deep breathing, walks etc.

1 day Intensive workshops: These would follow the exact same formats that have been offered and could be done both during the day or evening. More than likely, evening sessions could be more successful in London – although it would need to be for 3 evenings in order for Robert to teach the formula that he teaches in his Intensive Workshops. There might be a requirement to juggle between different towns in the UK.

Please send us some feedback so that we can ascertain the amount of interest and what people are interested in so that we can know if we can make this possibility manifest this year. Email us to let us know.

Here is some of the feedback from the Intensive Training Workshops / retreats that Robert has done in the past.

“I found this session to be very useful in seeing the what & the why of “my” reality.The understanding I have gained gives me hope in my future.This has been the greatest gift I have ever given myself.”

“I really enjoyed Robert Burney’s Intensive Training on inner child work. . .I had many revelations about my inner child and how I can reparent and stop the critical parent that has followed me my whole life. . . Thank you so much Robert.You are a truly unforgetable person. So glad I said yes to attending.”

“Exceptionally understandable; very clear.This was LIFE Changing – I am so thankful.I would Absolutely recommend it.”

“Robert Burney’s training day was so inspirational and enlightening. He was loving and warm and presented profound life changing material in a very not intimidating way. Magical!”

“My life has been much better since I went to your seminar.”

“Brilliant. Liberating. So profound it is sometimes ! hilarious I feel you completely get the dynamics of the human experience and the truth you teach can set people free.”

“It was very empowering, uplifting and gave me new hope. The information was invaluable.”

“Robert is a very , compassionate intuitive, and intelligent soul who shares his insights to you in such a clear, fun, and poignant way that your life will be forever changed.” – Testimonial Page for Robert Burney Seminar

The key to codependency recovery is the inner child healing work I describe on my site: A key element of that work includes learning to set internal boundaries.The formula that I pioneered for inner healing – which includes learning to set the internal boundaries –is something that I teach people through telephone counseling(It is now possible to get phone cards for very cheap rates from many places in the world – and also to use Skype for free from anywhere.)I talk about how the phone counseling can work to really change a persons life for the better in a short period of time on this page which includes some special combination offers.

Reading my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls (links to all of my books in hard copy, ebook, and audiobook format are on that page – or you can get Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks through Amazon) would really help you take your understanding to a whole new level.Understanding codependency is vital in helping us to forgive our self for the dysfunctional ways we have lived our lives – it is not our fault we are codependent.

In the last few years I have also published two more books that can be very helpful. Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing and Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth.I have special offers for either or both of these books (or for all three of my books) on this page.

I also offer periodic day long workshops to teach people how to apply my inner child healing formula. (There is now a downloadable MP3 recording available of my Life Changing workshop – and I have a page with special offers for both the workshop recording and an MP3 download of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls. )

Codependency causes us to feel like the victim of our own thoughts and feelings, and like our own worst enemy – recovery helps us to start learning how to be our own best friend.Getting into codependency recovery is an act of love for self.

“I didn’t have to live in fear and make myself crazy about something that didn’t happen”

October 29, 2013 at 1:31pm (I originally wrote this as a note on Facebook)

Yesterday I got the results of a biopsy and it was negative – great news! What was also really great is that in the 10 days between the time the biopsy was taken and when I got the results, I didn’t have to live in fear and make myself crazy about something that didn’t happen. That is because of my recovery and having had the blessing of learning how to set internal boundaries emotionally and mentally so I can keep letting go of the outcome, of things I can’t control. In the past, waiting for an outcome that was important to me – like the results of this biopsy – would have been excruciating. I am so grateful for my recovery. For having learned how to have the ability to let go of my fear in the moment and say to myself that is about the future, I don’t need to know that today.

My disease wants to project horror movies into the future of impending doom, financial tragedy, being along forever. Because of my recovery I don’t have to get all emotionally caught up in things that haven’t happened yet, in outcomes in the future which may never happen. I am very grateful that I have the tools and knowledge to not allow my childhood wounding and programming to dictate the quality of my life today.

“When I was about two years in recovery there was a time when I was talking to my sponsor on the phone. I had just lost my job, the car had broken down, and I had to move out of my apartment in two weeks. Talk about tragedy and impending doom! I was laying in bed feeling very sorry for myself and very terrified about how painful it was going to be when I became homeless. After listening to me for a while my sponsor asked me, “What’s up above you?” It was a stupid question and I told him so. I was pissed that he wasn’t giving me the sympathy I deserved – but he insisted that I answer. So I finally said, “Well, the ceiling.” And he said, “Oh, so your not homeless tonight are you?”” – Gratitude – a Vital Tool in the Recovery Process

“One of the things I say often, is that I realized I had spent most of my life before recovery worrying about decisions I never had to make – because when it became time to make the decision it was obvious what to do. The situation had changed or new information had come in – and the days and weeks (and sometimes months) I had spent worrying about that decision were a waste of time and energy. One of the greatest recovery tools I have learned is just to be able to say, “I don’t have to decide that today” or “I don’t have to know that today” – and let go of the outcome I am worried about for today.” – Joy2MeU Update Newsletter April 2009

“They say that God made the world round so we can’t see too far over the horizon. The details about how those events over the horizon are going to work out are not my business today. If I am putting all my energy into figuring out how I am going to cross the mountain way off in the distance, then I am liable to step into a hole that is directly in front of me on my path today. (Could cause me to hurt my leg 😉 I need to keep an eye on the horizon so that I can make any adjustments to my heading that I need to make – but most of my attention and energy needs to be focused on what is in front of me to do and experience in my life today. I want to be present for my life today and be able to enjoy the scenery that is part of the texture of my journey today. In my codependency, my fear and shame driven relationship with life caused me to be incapable of being present in the moment because I was focused on the future or the past. One of the gifts of my recovery is the ability to be here today, to be available for moments of happiness and Joy no matter how many frightening unknowns are looming on the horizon – no matter how impossible it looks to me for me to ever get there.

I haven’t reached a point in my journey from which it is possible to see the details of how this transition is going to unfold. My part as a co-creator in this life experience means that I am responsible for planting seeds and gathering information and doing the footwork to prepare myself for those events on and over the horizon – but the details will not become clear until I have reached the point in my journey when I need to see them clearly. One of the greatest stress reducers in my recovery was the insight that it wasn’t doing me any good to worry about decisions that it was not yet time to make – that worry was in fact a symptom that I was in my disease trying to figure out how to control life because of my fear, and it created more fear. A very dysfunctional dynamic – that is the essence of the condition of codependency – which prevented me from ever really living life, until recovery.

“Worry – which is negative fantasizing – is a reaction to fear of the unknown which creates more fear, which creates more worry, which creates more fear, etc. This fear is not a normal human fear of the unknown. It is codependent fear: a distorted, magnified, virulent, mutated species of fear caused by the poisonous combination of a false belief that being human is shameful with a polarized (black and white, right and wrong) perspective of life. This self perpetuating, self destructive type of obsessive thinking feeds not only on fear, but on shaming ourselves for feeling the fear.

The disease of codependency is a dysfunctional emotional defense system adapted by our egos to help us survive. The polarized perspective of life we were programmed with in early childhood, causes us to be afraid of making a mistake, of doing life “wrong.” At the core of our being, we feel unlovable and unworthy – because our parents felt unlovable and unworthy – and we spend great amounts of energy trying to keep our shameful defectiveness a secret. We feel that, if we were perfect like we “should” be, we would not feel fear and confusion, and would have reached “happily ever after” by now. So, we shame ourselves for feeling fear, which adds gasoline to the inferno of fear that is driving us. The shame and fear that drive obsession becomes so painful and ‘crazy making’ that at some point we have to find some way to shut down our minds for a little while – drugs or alcohol or food or sleep or television, etc.

It is a very dysfunctional, and sad, way to relate to life. The fear we are empowering is about the future – the shame is about the past. We are not capable of being in the now and enjoying life because we are caught up in trauma melodramas about things which have not yet happened – or wallowing in orgies of self recrimination about the past, which can not be changed. Codependents do not really live life – we endure, we survive, we persevere.” – Obsession / Obsessive Thinking Part 1

I am not writing the script, am not in control of this human experience, so I need to do what I am led to do when I am led to do it – with faith that a Loving plan is unfolding. Worry is negative fantasy. Fear of the future does not serve me on my path today – takes away my ability to be here now. The fear will come up certainly – just as it did when I wrote the paragraph above – but that is normal and human. I can use my recovery tools to let go of that fear of the unknown – and have boundaries with the critical parent voice in my head which wants me to project a fantasy of impending doom, a horror movie in my mind, that will cause me to create artificial fear in my life today. As I talked about in my article on Acceptance (Serenity – Accepting the things we cannot change), I learned that 90% of the stress in my life before codependency recovery was my responsibility, something I had some control over – and I do not have to create that kind of stress in my life any more, thanks to recovery and my faith in the Great Spirit.” – Joy2MeU Update Newsletter November 2002

“The number one tool of the ego is fear. Anytime we feel fear, there are multiple levels involved – multiple perspectives from which that fear is originating. And, like all the other emotions we experience, fear has a purpose and needs to be honored as a gift. Emotions do not have value in and of themselves – they just are. What give emotions a positive or negative value is how we react to them. Most of us learned to have negative reactions to emotions because our perspective of our own emotions was all messed up in childhood. (Due to the messages and role modeling of the adults around us.)

Fear is an important tool in living. It is there to protect us, to help us avoid situations and people who will do us harm. It is our relationship to fear that is dysfunctional because of our childhood experiences.

There is a level of fear that is unavoidable in being human – that is fear of the unknown.

“This human experience is a process that involves inherent conflict between the continuously changing nature of life and the human ego’s need to survive. In order to insure survival (which is the ego’s appointed task) the human ego needs to define things. What is food? What is friend or enemy? Who am I and how do I relate to them? What can hurt me and what brings me pleasure? It also learned that it is healthy to have a fear of the unknown (it was important to check an unknown cave for saber toothed tigers before strolling into it.) As a result, the ego fears change and craves security and stability. But because life is constantly changing, security and stability can only be temporary.” – Loving and Nurturing self on your Spiritual Path

Fear of the unknown is a natural, normal part of being human. It has a purpose – and deserves to be honored as something which serves us. But, like our relationship with all the aspects of our being, our relationship with that fear is dysfunctional.

The damaged ego responds to it’s programming by generating fear of the things we learned to fear as a child: making mistakes; doing it wrong; being emotional; speaking our Truth; taking risks; being alone; not being alone; whatever. We then empower the fear by focusing on it, magnifying it, and generally giving it the power to define us and our life – or by denying it, which also gives it power because in denying our fear we are denying our self and reality. Going to either extreme results in the inability to see the situation clearly.

Because our ego was programmed to react to life from fear, negativity, scarcity, and lack (again due to emotional trauma we experienced, and the messages and role modeling of the adults around us) the disease focuses on and magnifies fear – and then it scrambles around trying to find something to cover up and repress the very fear it is generating. The disease blows the fear way out of proportion and then leads us to addictive and/or compulsive behavior as a way of stuffing the fear.” – The Recovery Process for inner child healing – through the fear

“Learning to apply the Serenity Prayer has helped me to stop creating so much artificial stress in my life because I wasn’t accepting reality as it was being presented to me.About 90% of the stress I used to experience in my life was artificially created – was created by my attitudes and expectations.As I say in that journal entry:

“So, I accept whatever it is that I perceive as deprivation today – and make the best of today.That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t generate stress for me.But the stress is like the 3. earthquake as compared to the 8. earthquake that my perspective of life used to generate for me.”” – Serenity – Accepting the things we cannot change

1/19/17 – I added this last quote while publishing this on my blog today. I have been neglecting this blog – apologies to all my followers. The main reason is that I have been posting quotes and links on Facebook almost every day – and that is much easier than publishing these blog entries. I will try to post more of these in the coming weeks but if you want to get an almost daily dose of my writing, sent me a Friend request on Facebook.

The key to codependency recovery is the inner child healing work I describe on my site. A key element of that work includes learning to set internal boundaries. It is learning to set internal boundaries that can help us stop living in fear of the future or regret about the past – and be more present to experience today.

The formula that I pioneered for inner healing – which includes learning to set the internal boundaries – is something that I teach people through telephone counseling (It is now possible to get phone cards for very cheap rates from many places in the world – and also to use Skype for free from anywhere.) I talk about how the phone counseling can work to really change a persons life for the better in a short period of time on this page which includes somespecial combination offers.

Reading my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls (links to all of my books in both hard copy, ebook, and audiobook format are on that page – or you can get Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks through Amazon) really help people take their understanding to a whole new level. Understanding codependency is vital in helping us to forgive our self for the dysfunctional ways we have lived our lives – it is not our fault we are codependent.

In the last few years I have also published two more books that can be very helpful. Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing and Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth. I have special offers for either or both of these books (or for all three of my books) on this page.

I also offer periodic day long workshops to teach people how to apply my inner child healing formula. (There is now a downloadable MP3 recording available of my Life Changing workshop – and I have a page with special offers for both the workshop recording and an MP3 download of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls. )

Codependency causes us to feel like the victim of our own thoughts and feelings, and like our own worst enemy – recovery helps us to start learning how to be our own best friend. Getting into codependency recovery is an act of love for self.

“. . . . . That was the day that I started experiencing and understanding that emotions are actually energy – are something that is very real.Thus the title of this ebook The Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real.This ebook is a follow up to my ebook The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & MisinterpretedA Larger Spiritual Paradigm.

My reasons for publishing these ebooks are summed up in the following paragraph from my ebook The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & Misinterpreted.

“I am publishing this book because I believe that the way the Law of Attraction is being taught by most people who are teaching it today is not ultimately Loving. I believe it is being taught in a way that makes many of the people hearing it feel ashamed; in a way that causes people to focus on reaching a destination at the expense of being present in the now; in a way that reinforces the delusion that there is something inherently wrong with being human, with human beings. It is also being taught by most spiritual teachers in a way that discounts and devalues emotions and emotional healing.”

This ebook The Metaphysics of Emotions will be part two of the hard copy book that will be titled:The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & MisinterpretedA Larger Spiritual Paradigm – including The Metaphysics of Emotions.(I haven’t published the hard copy book yet and am not sure when I am going to.)In this ebook I will address the Truth as I understand it – that is, that emotional energy is real.” – Author’s Foreword

Table of Contents

Author’s Foreword

The Metaphysics of Emotions

Mystical messengers and Master Teachers

emotional energy is real

Metaphysical = beyond the physical

Dysfunction both Eastern & Western

A Larger Perspective

Feeling the Feelings – grief / emotional energy release

Energetic Clarity

quantum physics

Etheric plane

Tuning into Love instead of fear and shame

Etheric X-ray

Multiple Levels / Perspectives

Progress not perfection

Spiritual Beings having a human experience

” . . . . . In the ebook that I am publishing this ebook as a companion to – The Law of Attraction – Misunderstood & Misinterpreted – I talk about some of the reasons I believe these mystical messengers / spiritual teachers are giving out messages that are affected by codependency. Those include black and white thinking and shame about being human, but the discounting of emotions is the one that this ebook is addressing.

Emotional Energy is Real

Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls

“The dance of wounded souls is a self-perpetuating cycle of cause and effect that has evolved into becoming the Human Condition.That dance of Codependence – as it can now be called – is both a cause, a tune that we have been dancing to, and the effect, the dance itself.Codependence is not the original cause – it is a cause in the self-perpetuating cycles of cause and effect that have dictated the course of human evolution.

The original wound, which I will discuss a little later, had the effect of creating a Spiritually hostile condition on this planet.That Spiritually hostile condition then became a cause with many consequences.

One of the most devastating of these consequences, or effects, was that human beings began to express emotions in destructive ways.Because the channel between Spiritual Self and human self was disrupted by planetary condition, the human ego began to develop the belief that it was separate from other humans and from the Source.This belief in separation made violence possible.

The violence, caused by the false belief, meant that humans could no longer enjoy a free-flowing emotional process.As a consequence, emotionally-repressive environments evolved in the social systems on this planet.Human beings were forced to adopt defense systems that included the belief that emotions were negative and had to be suppressed and controlled.This was necessary in order for human beings to live together in communities that would insure the survival of the human race.

It is not necessary any longer!And it is dysfunctional.

The act of suppressing emotions was always dysfunctional in its effect on the emotional, mental, and Spiritual health of the individual being.It was only functional in terms of physical survival of the species.

We now have clearer access to Spiritual healing energy and guidance which allows us to become aligned with Truth so that emotions will not be expressed in destructive ways.We have the tools, knowledge, and guidance to allow emotional healing to take place, to allow the individual to enjoy the flow of healthy emotional process.

Attempting to suppress emotions is dysfunctional; it does not work.Emotions are energy:E-motion = energy in motion.It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow.

Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be – even those emotions that feel uncomfortable.Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing.These are not negative emotional responses!We were taught to react negatively to them.It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion.

Codependence is a deadly and fatal disease because of emotional dishonesty and suppression.It breaks our hearts, scrambles our minds, and eventually kills our physical body vehicles because of the Spiritual dis-ease, because of our wounded souls.

The key to healing our wounded souls is to get clear and honest in our emotional process.Until we can get clear and honest with our human emotional responses – until we change the twisted, distorted, negative perspectives and reactions to our human emotions that are a result of having been born into, and grown up in, a dysfunctional, emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment – we cannot get clearly in touch with the level of emotional energy that is Truth.We cannot get clearly in touch with and reconnected to our Spiritual Self.

We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great Spirit.But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted, distorted attitudes and false beliefs.” – quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

Emotions are real. Emotions are energy that is manifested into the body in a dimension, on a level, that cannot be seen or measured in any concrete way.

Traditional Western medical science has discounted emotions because it can not be measured or detected as tangible, physical substance.

“Traditional Western medical science has ignored and discounted the spiritual and emotional components of being. The traditional medical perspective in relationship to any physically or psychologically manifested dis-ease is limited by a left brain (concrete, rational) intellectual paradigm which is entirely focused on that which can be seen, measured, quantified. Therefore, any spiritual, emotional, and mental dis-ease is seen as resulting from biochemical, physiological, physical conditions. Doctors (which includes psychiatrists of course) – and other traditional medical and mental health professionals – were trained to identify mental and emotional problems as biological and to see the solution as chemical.

There are certainly neurobiological aspects to any behavioral manifestation, but it is not possible for a scientific perspective which requires empirical proof to truly ascertain the cause of any condition – because emotional and spiritual components of a human’s being can not be quantified. In other words, brain chemistry is definitely out of balance in relationship to any physical disorder or mental condition – including OCD, Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, etc. That imbalance in brain chemistry definitely has an impact on emotions – but it is not possible to say absolutely which is the cause and which is the effect. The chicken and egg conundrum. In other words, did the emotional trauma and the fear and shame based relationship to life cause the chemical imbalance in the brain – or did the chemical imbalance come first. Traditional Western medicine is not holistic – it does not treat the whole being, it treats symptoms. Medication is necessary for some people. It is an invaluable temporary help for others. It is not the whole answer. The great majority of doctors are limited by their training, the intellectual paradigm which determines their perspective, to believing that they do know the answers.” – Obsession / Obsessive Thinking Part 1

In the quote above I use the word empirical – a word that I mention in my ebook on the Law of Attraction that led me to the word metempirical – beyond experience, beyond evidence and observation. It is actually very easy to observe when someone is having feelings – but there isn’t any measurable, discernible substance to those emotions, thus they have been discounted in Western Civilization.”

“. . . . . . A key line in this is that ‘The attitudes, definitions, and belief systems which we hold mentally dictate our emotional reactions.’ This is a key point in the Law of Attraction teachings – and it is the Truth. We need to change the intellectual paradigm that is dictating our relationship with life in order to learn to be positive co-creators in our lives instead of the negative co-creators we were programmed to be in childhood. It is vital to change the intellectual programming – it is the only way to change our emotional experience of life. That is one of the reasons it is so important to align with the Law of Attraction – so that we can start creating more positive effect in our lives.

What so many people who are teaching the Law of Attraction don’t seem to understand however – or at least don’t communicate it in how they are teaching it – is that changing that ego programming now does not make the emotional energy from the past disappear. We cannot just start being in the Now and let go of the past (except in the moment – the more we heal the more ability we have to let go of the past and be present in the moment for more moments of the day.) We have repressed, suppressed, pressurized emotional energy within us in relationship to our emotional wounds. That is why it is so important to do the grief work to release some of that energy – to take power from those emotional “buttons” that dictate our reactions in intimate relationships. We can’t just start being spiritual in our relationships with other human beings without healing those emotional wounds from the past – releasing some of that repressed emotional energy.

“If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to feel Spiritual in relationship to nature or animals, here is your answer. It was people who wounded us in childhood. It is people who our egos developed defense systems to protect us from.

I have told people for years, that the only reason to do inner child healing work is if we are going to interact with other people. If one is going to live in isolation on a mountain top meditating, it will be fairly easy to feel Spiritually connected. It is relating to other human beings that is messy.” – Reprogramming our dysfunctional ego defenses”

“. . . . . The difference between the horizontal and the vertical emotions is what I was referring to in the Law of Attraction ebook when I wrote: ‘. . . a statement from Marianne Williamson that “What is not love is fear.” That is not only black and white but simplistic and linear as if Love and fear were the same type of emotional energy.’ As I have said, the goal is to align attitudinally with Love as the Truth – but that doesn’t mean we are not going to feel fear at times in our human adventure.

Marianne Williamson is obviously a powerful teacher of Truth, a mystical messenger carrying the message of Love – but she could use some codependency recovery to help her stop making black and white statements that are shaming and give people the impression they are doing something wrong if they feel fear.

All of us who are drawn to this healing, who have a soul compulsion to follow a spiritual path, who are in recovery seeking answers beyond what is available in most 12 step meetings, are old souls who are present in body in this lifetime to heal these wounds and settle Karma. Marianne Williamson is obviously an old soul who has done much work clearing her inner channel to Truth and Love and Light, but I do wish she would recognize the importance of clearing our inner channels of the repressed grief energy.

“The planetary conditions that blocked humans from accessing Christ Consciousness – the vibrational Knowing of the Truth of ONENESS – were in place for tens of thousands of years. Conditions have now changed! We have entered a new time, an Age of Healing & Joy has dawned in Human Consciousness on the planet. All of the “old-souls” involved in healing in this time have the capacity to access the Truth of ONENESS and Love through their inner channel.

(The term “old-soul” refers to the stage of consciousness evolution an individual has attained by this lifetime – it does not mean better than, or farther along than, those who do not have to do the healing. There is no hierarchy in the Truth of a Loving Great Spirit – those who appear to have low, or no, consciousness in this lifetime are simply doing their healing in another space-time illusion parallel to this one. All old-souls are born at a heart-chakra level of consciousness and therefore have more sensitivity, and less capacity for denial, than other people. In other words, the gift of having access to Truth and Love carries with it the price of greatly increased emotional sensitivity.)

Due to the planetary conditions, the human ego developed a belief in separation – which is what made violence possible and caused the human condition as we inherited it. The reflection of that human condition on the individual level is the disease of Codependence. Codependence is caused by the ego being traumatized and programed in early childhood so that our relationship with ourselves and the God-Force is dysfunctional – that is, it does not work to help us access the Truth of ONENESS and Love. It is through healing our relationship with ourselves that we open our inner channel and start tuning into the Truth.” – Jesus & Christ Consciousness

It is important to own our horizontal human emotions at the same time we are aligning with Higher Truth attitudinally. Developing a boundary between emotional and mental – relating to our thoughts and emotions as two different kinds / levels of energy, because they are – is the key to integrating Spiritual Truth into our emotional relationship with life. We need to clear our intellectual programming (including subconscious) of false beliefs and dysfunctional definitions and attitudes, at the same time we are learning to be Loving, nurturing and compassionate in relating to our own emotional wounds to take power away from the repressed emotional energy from our past. We need to set boundaries with both the critical parent voice and with the emotional wounds / inner children so that we can stop letting the past have so much power in how we are living today.

“One of most important steps to empowerment is integrating Spiritual Truth into our experience of the process. In order to do that it is necessary to practice discernment in our relationship with the emotional and mental components of our being.

We learned to relate to our inner process from a reversed perspective. We were trained to be emotionally dishonest (that is, to not feel the feelings or to go to the other extreme by allowing the feelings to totally run our lives) and to give power to, to buy into, the reversed attitudes (it is shameful to be human, it is bad to make mistakes, God is punishing and judgmental etc.) To find balance within we have to change our relationship with our inner process.

Feeling and releasing the emotional energy without giving power to the false beliefs is a vital component of achieving balance between the emotional and the mental. The more we align ourselves attitudinally, and clear out our inner channel, the easier it is for us to pick out the Truth from amid the dysfunctional attitudes – so that we can set an internal boundary between the emotional and mental.

Feelings are real but they are not necessarily fact or Truth.

We can feel like a victim and still know that the fact is we set ourselves up. We can feel like we made a mistake and still know that every mistake is an opportunity for growth, a perfect part of the learning process. We can feel betrayed or abandoned or shamed, and still know that we have just been given an opportunity to become aware of an area that needs some light shined on it, an issue that needs some healing.

We can have moments where we feel like God/life is punishing us and still know that “This, too, shall pass” and “More will be revealed,” – that later on, down the path a ways, we will be able to look back and see that what we perceived in the moment to be tragedy and injustice is really just another opportunity for growth, another gift of fertilizer to help us grow.

I needed to learn how to set boundaries within, both emotionally and mentally by integrating Spiritual Truth into my process. Because “I feel feel like a failure” does not mean that is the Truth. The Spiritual Truth is that “failure” is an opportunity for growth. I can set a boundary with my emotions by not buying into the illusion that what I am feeling is who I am. I can set a boundary intellectually by telling that part of my mind that is judging and shaming me to shut up, because that is my disease lying to me. I can feel and release the emotional pain energy at the same time I am telling myself the Truth by not buying into the shame and judgment.

If I am feeling like a “failure” and giving power to the “critical parent” voice within that is telling me that I am a failure – then I can get stuck in a very painful place where I am shaming myself for being me. In this dynamic I am being the victim of myself and also being my own perpetrator – and the next step is to rescue myself by using one of the old tools to go unconscious (food, alcohol, sex, etc.) Thus the disease has me running around in a squirrel cage of suffering and shame, a dance of pain, blame, and self-abuse.

By learning to set a boundary with and between our emotional truth, what we feel, and our mental perspective, what we believe – in alignment with the Spiritual Truth we have integrated into the process – we can honor and release the feelings without buying into the false beliefs.

The more we can learn intellectual discernment within, so that we are not giving power to false beliefs, the clearer we can become in seeing and accepting our own personal path. The more honest and balanced we become in our emotional process, the clearer we can become in following our own personal Truth.”

This next excerpt is from an article in which I stress the importance of recognizing the healing and recovery are a process. Life is not about reaching destinations – it is a journey. The goal is to learn to relax and enjoy the journey while we are healing. When we are living life in reaction to old tapes and old wounds, we do not have the capacity to relax and enjoy the journey.

Etheric X-ray

“I learned in my own grieving process – and later applied in my work with clients – to pay attention to where the energy was manifesting in the body. The grief associated with my emotional incest issues was being carried in my lower back on the right side. As I mentioned above, this grief was near the second chakra because it was associated with my relationship with my own body and sexuality. It was in my back because that is where I carry issues I don’t want to see. It was on my right side – which is the masculine side – because it was blocking me in my relationship with my own gender, which was greatly affecting my relationship with women.

It would seem that the process of healing would be easier if we could go into a healers office and get an etheric x-ray taken of our emotional, mental, spiritual bodies as well as of our physical bodies. The diagnosis might come out sounding something like this:

Well, we have, what looks like a good 3 pounds of grief energy here in your back near the second chakra – that indicates some grief related to sexual issues that you don’t want to look at, probably some sexual abuse, or at the least some wounds in relationship to sexuality and gender.

And a good 5 pounds of grief around your heart chakra. Those indicate multiple traumas to the heart – a strong pattern of looking for Love in all the wrong places, trying to fill your heart with love from external sources.

There is also some severe congestion in your throat area. Your throat chakra is completely closed – which indicates an inability to own your voice and speak your Truth. It also includes internal communication problems, that is blockage in your ability to trust your own intuition. Which is related to the dark mass here in your forehead. That is your third eye – or Spiritual vision – chakra, and shows that the intellectual programming in your mind is too limited and blocks your ability to see your self or life from an expanded Spiritual perspective. etc., etc.

But the reality of how the healing process works is that we need to peel away the layers of our codependent defense system gradually. There are healers who can tell us that we have these grief issues – as I stated in an earlier quote.

“It is possible to get intellectually aware of some of them through such tools as hypnosis, or having a therapist or psychic or energy healer tell us they are there – but we cannot really understand how much power they carry without feeling the emotional context – and cannot change them without reducing the emotional charge / releasing the emotional energy tied to them. Knowing they are there will not make them go away.” – Grieving – examples of how the process works

In the case study that I quoted earlier, I mention how I said to the man the very first session that there were childhood issues that were keeping from being able to let go.I could have quizzed him more completely about his history and most likely have pinpointed that the time of his parents divorce was the crucial period in relationship to what he was going through when he came to me. But that would not have helped him to get in touch with those issues in an emotional context. He needed to go through the process of pealing layers of his defenses to gradually get to those specific emotional wounds.

There was a quote in a meditation book that I read a year before I went into treatment. This was before I had surrendered to doing the emotional healing. It was a message from the Universe that was part of my path of being led to do the emotional work. It really made me angry when I first read it. A year later when I was in treatment, someone in my primary therapy group – which I attended at least once every weekday – would be asked to read the days meditation. There were 5 or 6 daily meditation books lying around in that therapy room. Whoever was asked to read the days meditation would pick one of those books and open it up – either randomly or specifically to the meditation for that day. During my 30 days in treatment, I only was asked to read the meditation once. I reached down on the floor and grabbed the nearest meditation book and opened it up. I opened it up to the same quote I had read a year earlier. It still made me angry. It said something to this affect:

A knowledge of the path does not replace putting one foot in front of the other.

We are here to go through the process – to experience the journey. The human part of me wants to jump to the end and get to happily ever after. I needed to learn to accept that the process unfolded gradually, that there were always more layers of the onion to be peeled – and some tears to be cried with each level.

It is through experiencing the journey in the moment one day at a time, that we heal our wounds and settle the Karma we are here to settle.

The reality is that our emotional pain is so great that if all of our defenses and denial were stripped away at once, it would kill us. So, getting such an etheric x-ray would only point us in the direction we need to travel – it wouldn’t help us skip any part of the process. We get the guidance we need to know the direction to travel, by following the carrots – the messages from the Universe. We don’t get to know what the future holds. We do get everything we need for our journey one day at a time – even when it doesn’t feel like it.

“There is no quick fix! Understanding the process does not replace going through it! There is no magic pill, there is no magic book, there is no guru or channeled entity that can make it possible to avoid the journey within, the journey through the feelings.”” – Attack on America – Chapter 9

This last excerpt is important because it does emphasize that we need to go through the process – that life and recovery are a journey. As the quote from my book that ended that excerpt states: “Understanding the process does not replace going through it!” It doesn’t matter how much knowledge one has of the metaphysics, we still need to feel and release the emotions in order to clear our inner channel to Truth and Love.

“Each and every one of us has an inner channel. We now have the capability to atone – which means tune into – to atone, to tune into the Higher Consciousness. To tune into the Higher vibrational emotional energies that are Joy, Light, Truth, Beauty, and Love.

We can tune into the Truth of “at ONE ness.” Atone = at ONE. Atonement = at ONE ment, in a condition of ONENESS.

We now have access to the highest vibrational frequencies – we can tune into the Truth of ONENESS. By aligning with Truth we are tuning into the higher energy vibrations that reconnect us with the Truth of ONENESS.

This is the age of atonement, but it does not have anything to do with judgment and punishment. It has to do with tuning our inner channel into the right frequencies.

But our inner channel is blocked and cluttered with repressed emotional energy and dysfunctional attitudes. The more we clear our inner channel through aligning with Truth attitudinally, and releasing the repressed emotional energy through the grief process, the clearer we can tune into the music of Love and Joy, Light and Truth.

It is not easy because we have been taught to look at being human backwards. We were forced to accept a reversed perspective. We were emotionally and subconsciously programmed to react to life dysfunctionally based on reversed belief systems.

We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.

NOT human creatures who have to earn Spiritual existence. We are not flawed, shameful humans who have to do human perfectly, who have to do the “right” things in order to transcend.”

In a quote I use later in this ebook, I state: ‘We are the music of The Great Spirit – we’ve just been way out of tune.’” – fromThe Metaphysics of Emotions – emotional energy is real

““The way we change the dance of Codependence to the dance of Recovery, the way we tame the dragon inside, is through integration and balance. One of the ways we do that is by stopping the dysfunctional behavior of looking for the Prince or Princess who is going to fix us and make us whole.

The Prince and the Princess exist within. That Prince, the Masculine Energy of Manifestation and Action, and that Princess, the Feminine Energy of Creativity and Nurturing, exist within us in perfect balance and harmony. They always have – and they always will.

As has been stated, we are not broken – we do not need fixing. It is our relationship with ourselves which needs to be healed; it was our sense of self that was shattered and fractured and broken into pieces – not our True Self.” – all quotes in this color are fromCodependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

Romantic relationships are the greatest arena for Spiritual and emotional growth available to us. A romantic relationship is an adventure in growth, an joint expedition into intimacy. A relationship cannot “fix” us – is not the goal where happily ever after begins.

A relationship will be work. It will be challenging and exciting, frustrating and painful. It will help us to access Joy and get us in touch with grief. It will offer lots of opportunities for helping us learn about our self and our wounds.

In order to have the opportunity to become healthier in relationship to romance and intimacy, it is vital to start building a solid foundation within ourselves upon which it might be possible to have healthier relationship. Healthy relationship starts at home, in our relationship with ourselves. Unless we are in recovery, doing our emotional healing, there is no chance of having a healthy relationship.

I want to restate here, that recovery is not a black and white, 1 or 10 process. The goal is not to have a perfectly healthy relationship – the goal is to become gradually healthier in our relationship interactions. Progress not perfection is what is possible. There is no destination to reach, we make gradual progress in getting healthier and learning to love ourselves more – as I say in my book in this quote.

“When I say that you cannot Truly Love others unless you Love yourself – that does not mean that you have to completely Love yourself first before you can start to Love others.The way the process works is that every time we learn to Love and accept ourselves a little tiny bit more, we also gain the capacity to Love and accept others a little tiny bit more.

When I say that you cannot start to access intuitive Truth until you clear out your inner channel – I am not saying that you have to complete your healing process before you can start getting messages. You can start getting messages as soon as you are willing to start listening.The more you heal the clearer the messages become.

When I talk about ways that we use to go unconscious – like workaholism, or exercise, or food, or whatever – I am not saying that you should be ashamed if you are doing some of these things.

We cannot go from unconscious to conscious overnight!This healing is a long gradual process.We all still need to go unconscious sometimes.Recovery is a dance that celebrates progress, not one that achieves perfection.”

If you are striving to learn to be healthier in relationship, it needs to start with learning how to Love self.If we are not respecting, honoring, and Loving our self – then it doesn’t matter how much someone else Loves or respects us – it won’t work to make us happy and at peace.

(I also want to note that there is nothing bad or shameful about being in a relationship that doesn’t meet the criteria I have talked about in this series. Progress in recovery means learning to Love ourselves by gradually stopping the self judgment and shame. Each of us needs to decide what works for us on our path.No one has a right to tell someone else what their path is – or to judge someone else’s path.You may be in a relationship that works for you on some level – financial security for instance – and you are the only one that can decide if the payoff you are getting is worth the price you are paying.It is your choice and you will be the one who lives with the consequences – so do whatever you need to do to be at peace with yourself.Living our life according to anyone else’s values but our own is dysfunctional.)

Until we start learning how to be emotionally honest with ourselves, we do not have the capacity to be Truly honest with another.If we are reacting to old wounds and old tapes without learning how to process through those issues – then we will end up feeling like a victim. If we cannot see ourselves clearly then we will not be able to see the other person clearly.It is also important to see romance clearly.It is vital to have clear and realistic expectations of romance – to have a perspective of romantic relationship that is empowering to both peopleWe need to put some energy into changing our definitions of what a romantic relationship is supposed to be so that the dysfunctional perspectives and expectations we learned in childhood will not set us up to react defensively and personalize the other persons behavior.

For each of us, our first commitment needs to be to Self. (Self as in True Self, Spiritual Self)We are each responsible for our own life. If we allow ourselves to give away power over our self esteem, we are being the victim of our codependency – and we will end up feeling like a victim of other people.Empowerment involves seeing reality as it is and making the best of the choices we have available to us.Each of us has the power to improve the quality of our own life by being committed to our self/Self.

If we decide to enter into an interdependent partnership, a relationship, with another person who is open to growing – then our commitment to self/Self will serve the relationship.As long as our commitment to be and become all we can be is served by a relationship then it is very important to be committed to working through the issues that arise.To sacrifice your higher good in the name of commitment to a relationship is codependent and an act of dishonesty to, and disrespect for, self/Self.Commitment to a relationship is important – but it comes second to the commitment to Self.

The other person is a teacher for us, as we are for them.Seeing a relationship as a joint adventure in growing and learning to Love is the key to creating healthy intimacy with another human being. It will not be easy, it will take some effort and energy, but it can be the most wonderful, incredible adventure of your life.

I am going to end this chapter by listing the characteristics of Love vs toxic love that I included in the first chapter of this book.The ones labeled toxic love could also be labeled codependent.Focusing on cultivating the ones labeled Love will lead to healthier, happier relationships with your self/Self, with others, and with life itself.It also will open you to the possibility of having a healthy, Loving romantic relationship.

Announcing that as of 8 am Monday July 7th eBook 1 (the first 20 chapters of The Greatest Arena) will be available via a discounted count down sale on Amazon.com.Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth eBook 1: Codependent Dysfunctional Relationship Dynamics & Healthy Relationship Behavior which is normally $9.99 will available at $.99 starting Monday morning for a week – with the price increasing by $1 every 32 hours.On July 13th it will go on sale via a discounted count down on Amazon.co.uk for a week.

““As long as we are reacting to old wounds and old tapes we cannot respond to the now. The more we heal, the more responsibility we have – that is, ability to respond. The ability to respond in the moment.”

“By doing our emotional healing, by changing the dysfunctional attitudes, we can start being responsible in our lives – that is, we can begin to have the ability to respond to life honestly in the moment.

Until we heal our wounds, until we become honest and clear in our emotional process, we are not able to be discerning. We are not capable of responding to life in the now – we are only able to react out of old grief, out of old tapes.” – quotes in this color are fromCodependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

The single most important step in this inner healing work is detachment. It is developing a detached level of consciousness – and observer / witness perspective – that allows us to start practicing discernment in relationship to both our inner and outer process. This facilitates the process of learning how to have internal boundaries so that we can start having the wisdom and clarity to integrate a Loving Spiritual belief system and intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into our emotional relationship with life. Then we are able to start achieving some emotional balance, and start owning our power to be a positive conscious co-creator of our life experience – a Loving, mature, empowered force in our own lives, instead of an unconscious co-creator out of the negative, self abusive, self sabotaging reactions that are caused by our emotional wounds and the codependent behavior patterns adapted in childhood.

By developing detachment we can start practicing discernment – having the wisdom to know the difference between the things we cannot change and the things which we can – which will allow us to develop internal boundaries so that we can stop being the victim of our wounds and dysfunctional intellectual programming. Developing some detachment from our own internal process is necessary so we can stop reacting and learn to respond in the moment in a healthy, mature manner – as an empowered, Spiritually enlightened adult, instead of a frightened, wounded child.

“As long as we keep reacting out of black and white polarized thinking, we are powerless to change our patterns. Recognizing we were powerless out of ego self to do anything but react, creates the space to allow us to start changing our relationship with ourselves and stop being our own worst enemy. Recognizing our powerlessness to control life out of ego, helps us to begin to take power away from the feeling of toxic shame and start forgiving ourselves. Awakening to the futility, the inherent dysfunction, of allowing our early childhood ego programming to define us and run our lives – and our powerlessness to change that until we became conscious that it needed to, and could, be changed – begins the process of learning to Love ourselves, and creates the space to start being open to relaxing and enjoying life. By learning to stop empowering polarized reaction to the toxic shame, we can start being honest enough with ourselves to own our responsibility in how our lives have unfolded so that we can make amends to our self and others – and that allows us to start changing our behavior and relationship patterns substantially and significantly.” – Attack on America – A Call for Higher ConsciousnessChapter 5

Awakening to Higher Consciousness

On January 3, 2011 I celebrated 27 (now 30) years of being clean and sober. I have been clean and sober for longer than I drank and used for some years now. An amazing miracle that has unfolded one day at a time. Some of those days were excruciatingly painful – full of hopelessness and despair. In early recovery, I didn’t make it through those days sober because I wanted to be sober – or because I wanted to be alive. I made it through one day at a time because I was terrified of returning to, and getting stuck in, the hell I had been living in for the last 4 or 5 years of my drinking.

There is an old AA saying that: Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t open up the gates of heaven and let us in – it opens up the gates of hell and lets us out. When I got released from my alcoholic hell, what I found myself experiencing was life. The very thing I had been drinking to cope with!

What I realize now, is that I was released from alcoholic hell and found myself in codependent hell. My relationship with my self and with life condemned me to codependent hell – and alcohol and drugs had given me a vacation of sorts from dealing with the fact that I did not have a clue of how to live life in a functional way.

I am very, very grateful now that I am a recovering alcoholic. If I had not found alcohol and drugs, I would have killed myself in one way or another in my late teens or early twenties. My 17 plus year drinking career kept me alive long enough to be present when planetary conditions changed so that the New Age of Healing and Joy could dawn in human consciousness. Long enough to have available to me, the tools and knowledge to be able to heal my wounded soul and learn to live life in a way that works. Long enough that first Adult Children of Alcoholics, and then Co-Dependents Anonymous meetings, were available to help me in my healing process.

“The dysfunctional dance of Codependence is caused by being at war with ourselves – being at war within.

We are at war with ourselves because we are judging and shaming ourselves for being human. We are at war with ourselves because we are carrying around suppressed grief energy that we are terrified of feeling. We are at war within because we are “damming” our own emotional process – because we were forced to become emotionally dishonest as children and had to learn ways to block and distort our emotional energy.

We cannot learn to Love ourselves and be at peace within until we stop judging and shaming ourselves for being human and stop fighting our own emotional process, until we stop waging war on ourselves.”

Detachment and Delayed Gratification

I can see now, that the reason I was able to stay sober was because of two concepts that are invaluable to any healing or growth. The first one made the second possible. It is the first of these concepts that is the single most important step in the inner healing process – the one that I stress so much to anyone I am working with on how to change and improve the quality of their lives.

That concept is detachment.

Codependence is a compulsively reactive condition. I had gone through life like a pin ball – bouncing / reacting from one point to the next, from one person to the next. It was never my fault. Someone, or something else, was always to blame for how messed up my life was – for how awful I felt inside. I focused on blame and resentment because the only alternative that I knew was to blame myself. I was at war inside of myself – and because I was taught to look outside for definition and worth by the society I grew up in, I tried to assign the blame externally for that internal war.

At the core of codependency is shame about being human. This shame was caused by a polarized, black and white intellectual paradigm that empowered the perspective that the only alternatives for evaluating worth, for determining value, are right and wrong. Human beings are incapable of being perfect based upon a perspective in which the only alternatives are right and wrong.

Codependency is a dysfunctional relationship with life, with being human. It is the dance I learned to do as a little kid. It is a dance whose music is generated from fear and shame, to a rhythm dictated by black and white thinking. It is a dance characterized by movement between extremes – blame them or blame me, overreact or underreact, less than or better than, success or failure, win or lose, etc., – which makes balance impossible. There is no middle ground in a dance that can only be done right or wrong. There can be no inner peace.

Since I was continually attempting to do life perfect (or rebelling by going to the opposite extreme) according to false beliefs about the nature and purpose of being human, I could never have any inner peace. I judged my self and my life experience, both consciously and unconsciously, out of a dysfunctional polarized belief system – so that it was not possible to stop being at war within. At the core of my being I felt like I was a defective monster, some kind of shameful, unlovable loser – and I tried to deflect some of that pain by blaming others.

No wonder I drank. Alcohol – and later drugs of various kinds – saved my life.

The first thing I had to do to get sober was to detach enough from my personal reality – from my hellish emotional pain and shame, from the intellectual garbage generated by my twisted codependent thinking – to become conscious of the reality that alcohol was not working for me anymore. I had to get conscious enough to be able to realize that it had been many years since alcohol had given me the relief and good feelings that it had when I started drinking.

With any addictive, mind / mood altering substance / behavior, the very thing that brought some relief from the internal war and mental anguish – the substance or behavior that gives us feelings of being high, of rising above our lives of quiet desperation, of feeling good – becomes something that we feel is necessary just to feel normal. Then eventually, normal becomes very low indeed.

I had to detach from myself enough to look at my life from a perspective that allowed me to see that maybe my behavior had something to do with why I was so miserable – but that is was not because I was a shameful being. The twelve step concept of powerlessness – the idea that alcoholism was a disease rather than a weakness of character – allowed me to detach and view my behavior, my drinking and using, with enough objectivity to start seeing reality with more clarity.

Once I surrendered to the reality that alcohol was hurting me rather than helping me, then I could make some effort to start living life differently. It was necessary for me to get a detached, objective look at myself in order for me to get honest enough with myself to decide that it might be better for me to get sober. I did not stop drinking because I wanted to stop drinking. I stopped drinking because alcohol and drugs were not working for me any more. When I was able to look at reality with some detachment, I could see that what I thought was the solution had actually become the most pressing problem.

The second concept that was so valuable in staying sober and starting to change my life, was the concept of delayed gratification. When I first started recovery, I thought that living life one day at a time was a revolutionary concept for me. But looking back now, I can see that living life one day at a time is what I had been doing all my life. The difference was that I had been living out of instant gratification.

As I describe in my web article The codependent three step – A Dance of Shame, Suffering, & Self-Abuse, codependency is a vicious, compulsive, self-abusive dynamic – an prison that we are trapped in as long as we are reacting. In my codependent dance I was the victim of myself, I was my own perpetrator, and I rescued myself in ways that were ultimately self abusive. The shame and pain I was feeling was causing me to feel like a victim, the critical parent voice in my head was beating me up for being a stupid loser, and I was rescuing myself with drugs and alcohol.

In early recovery, I learned to think the next drink through to the consequences before picking it up. In other words, think about how I would feel about myself tomorrow if I take a drink today. And be conscious enough to tell myself the truth that I didn’t want just one drink – I wanted oblivion, unconsciousness.

So, I started living life one day at a time from a detached place of consciousness that was aware of cause and effect – and understood that not indulging in instant gratification today would help me to not hate myself so much tomorrow.

Detachment allowed me to start aligning myself with the way life really works – cause and effect – and choosing delayed gratification one day at a time. It has resulted in over 30 years of sobriety as I am publishing this chapter as a blog in June 2014.

Developing a friendly, compassionate observer self

“One of the difficulties in this healing process is that even after we start to awaken to being butterflies, a part of our mind keeps telling us that we are low, crawling, disgusting creatures.

Taking the power away from that part of us is the key to the healing process. A key to stopping the war inside. We need to take the shame and judgment out of the process on a personal level. It is vitally important to stop listening and giving power to that critical place within us that tells us that we are bad and wrong and shameful.

That “critical parent” voice in our head is the disease lying to us. Any shaming, judgmental voice inside of us is the disease talking to us – and it is always lying. This disease of Codependence is very adaptable, and it attacks us from all sides. The voices of the disease that are totally resistant to becoming involved in healing and Recovery are the same voices that turn right around and tell us, using Spiritual language, that we are not doing Recovery good enough, that we are not doing it right.

We need to become clear internally on what messages are coming from the disease, from the old tapes, and which ones are coming from the True Self – what some people call “the small quiet voice.”

We need to turn down the volume on those loud, yammering voices that shame and judge us and turn up the volume on the quiet Loving voice. As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are feeding back into the disease, we are feeding the dragon within that is eating the life out of us. Codependence is a disease that feeds on itself – it is self-perpetuating.

This healing is a long gradual process – the goal is progress, not perfection. What we are learning about is unconditional Love. Unconditional Love means no judgment, no shame.”

We all observe ourselves, but we do it from the perspective of the critical judge. It is our critical parent voice that provides the witness perspective in our lives. It is our own worst enemy, judging us and shaming us – calling us stupid or loser or fool. We all have experienced our critical parent voice beating ourselves up for being human by using whatever pet abusive names are part of our personal abusive relationship with self. To that critical observer self, nothing we do is ever good enough – except when we are reacting to the opposite extreme and telling ourselves how much better we are than others because they are mean or stupid or losers.

The critical parent voice is rooted in the subconscious intellectual paradigm that is defining and dictating our life experience. It is the play by play commentator that is providing running commentary on how well we are playing the game of life – and it is judging our performance based upon false beliefs about the nature and purpose of life, based upon a black and white perspective that dooms us to be the victim of being imperfect humans. It dictates how we react to life and then judges us for those reactions.

It is very important to start learning how to take power away from that critical parent voice so that we can start developing a witness perspective with a compassionate level of consciousness. So that we can start learning how to be our own best friend – instead of our own worst enemy.

The first step to developing this level of consciousness is to know that it is possible to develop it. Once we start to realize that we can have a detached observer perspective that is not judging us, then we can start raising our consciousness to be more aligned with Love than with fear and shame.

It takes awhile for us to get to a place where we can be compassionate with ourselves. In the beginning, we want to try to at least be able to observe ourselves from a neutral perspective – or even better from the perspective of a scientific observer. We can start to watch ourselves as if we were an alien species we are studying so that we can see ourselves and say, “Oh isn’t that interesting. Now why did I react that way.” Instead of “How can I be so stupid.”

Once we start to learn to be detached in a way that is not shaming, then we can start being the detective of our inner process – we can start tracking down the cause and effect relationship between our behaviors and our childhood programming.

We can also then start using that observer self as an inner defense attorney who can start to defend us from the critical parent voice. We already have a judge and prosecutor inside – we desperately need an inner defense attorney who can start setting boundaries with the critical parent voice.

A vital part of the healing process is having enough detachment to start relating to the critical parent programming – and the emotional wounds / inner child places within – as parts of us rather as our self. Achieving some separation within in our perspective of our own inner process is vital to setting boundaries within – and learning how to stop being the victim of ourselves.

This inner child healing / codependency recovery work is a process of transforming our relationship with ourselves into a more Loving and empowered relationship by starting to take some control over our inner process. We can learn how to develop the mature empowered adult within us – and let that part of us run our lives instead of our emotional wounds and dysfunctional intellectual programming.

We all have that adult within us already – we just need to own it. Until we can detach from our inner process enough to start seeing all the different parts of us, we cannot really understand all the conflict within. The only way to start achieving some inner peace is to develop a friendly, compassionate adult within who is on a Spiritual path and can make choices in our life from a place of Love instead of fear and shame.

Detachment is necessary for anyone to start changing their behavior patterns. The more we get conscious of the power of detaching and the choices it offers to us, the more powerfully we can align with the healing / Spiritual awakening process. I had to practice detachment in order to get, and stay, sober. It was necessary to detach from my own process before I could start seeing reality with more clarity. But I did not realize that was what I was doing. Once I started to realize how the process works, and how valuable a technique detachment is, then I could really start to be proactive in intervening in my own internal process and changing my internal programming. Then I could really be consciously involved in the process of changing my relationship with myself into one in which I could choose to be a co-creator in my life out of Love instead of reacting unconsciously out of my self hatred.

Awakening to a level of consciousness where I could start to take responsibility in, and for, my life from a perspective that was aligned with the dynamics of how life really works, allowed me to start learning how to be my own friend instead of my worst enemy. It allowed me to realize that the part of me that was shaming and judging me was just a part of me – it is not who I am. The emotional wounds that I was so afraid of were just parts of me also – I was able to learn how to stop letting the feelings of the little kid define and dictate my life, at the same time I was building a nurturing relationship with those parts of me. I could then learn to stop the part of me that was abusing me from making me feel like a victim, and start rescuing myself in ways that worked – in ways that were aligned with delayed gratification and Love.

Detachment was the key to creating the space in my consciousness to start the process of taking power away from the shame and judgment – to stop living life based on fear. As long as I was just reacting out of unconsciousness, I was powerless to change my behaviors. Detaching from my internal process enough to be more conscious of cause and effect created the space for me to start owning the power to make choices and take responsibility for the way I was living my life.

We can develop a recovery control center (as I have taken to calling it lately) that is making choices about our attitudes and behaviors from an enlightened perspective that is aligned with intuition instead of fear based impulsive reaction. We can develop a Loving, compassionate relationship with ourselves by having enough detachment to learn discernment. We can then own our power to be co-creators in our lives who can align ourselves with transforming our dance of life from one of dancing in the darkness feeling separate from the Creative Source, to one in which we are dancing in the Light of Love.

Creating the space to manifest Love

“I spent most of my life doing the Serenity prayer backwards, that is, trying to change the external things over which I had no control – other people and life events mostly – and taking no responsibility (except shaming and blaming myself) for my own internal process – over which I can have some degree of control. Having some control is not a bad thing; trying to control something or somebody over which I have no control is what is dysfunctional.”

What is so valuable, what I believe is unique, about the approach to inner child healing that I have been guided to develop and refine, is that it provides a formula for integrating Spiritual Truth and intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into one’s emotional relationship with life.

It does not matter how much Spiritual Truth, how many mystical experiences of oneness, how in tune with Love, you can feel in certain moments – if you cannot integrate it into your life in a way which changes your emotional experience of life on a moment to moment, day to day basis. You can go to therapy for many years, read all the Spiritual and self help books, go to workshops and seminars and lectures – compile encyclopedic intellectual knowledge of what healthy behavior is – and still be reacting to old wounds in the relationships that mean the most to you.

The missing ingredient for so many people who have been seeking for many years, is how to integrate what you know into how you feel about your experience life. That is what I teach people – because it is what I have spent many years learning. It is what I am still learning.

The telephone counseling that I have been doing since the spring of 2000 has led me to refine and fine tune my understanding of the dynamics of the healing process work. I resisted suggestions to do telephone counseling for quite awhile because I was concerned about how effective it would be. When working with someone in person, I can observe body language and look into their eyes. It is much easier to help a person get into their feelings, do their grief work, when working in person.

The very fact that I wasn’t in the presence of the person has turned out to be perfect – it actually forced me into a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the process. Working with people on the telephone led me to focus on how to help the person change their relationship with themselves and life in the quickest, most effective way.

I realized that I did not need to know a lot of details about the persons story. I will get just enough information from them to be able to identify the primary themes and issues in their lives – and the dynamics in childhood that spawned these issues. That allows me to explain the dynamics to them in a way they can understand and relate to from their personal experience.

The dynamics of codependence are universal and predictable – because all human beings share the same emotions and emotional process. The internal dynamics of the interrelationship between the mental and emotional levels of our beings is something I understand intimately. Each of us is unique and different in the details of our lives, in the flavor of codependency we adapted – but we all have the same basic internal dynamic.

I wrote the final draft of my book, Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls, in 1995. Everything I say about the disease and the recovery process in that book is perfectly aligned with what I know today. It is a Truly amazing book that I am very grateful to have been guided to write.

“The terrorist attack on September 11th, was a blatant and straightforward manifestation of the dynamics of codependence that I explained in Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls. The subtitle of that book is A Cosmic Perspective of Codependence and the Human Condition. That book is a work of mystical Spirituality. I believe it is a Divinely inspired message to remind all wounded souls of the Truth of Love and ONENESS. As I mentioned in my last Update, I am just now starting to live at the level of consciousness that I was guided to access while writing The Dance of Wounded Souls.

“One of the things that I am realizing in the processing that was set off by this latest breakthrough in my process, is that I seem to just now be reaching – on a personal level – the level of consciousness that my book was written out of. It has been over 10 years now, since I wrote the core of what was to become Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls – over a period of 48 frenzied hours of writing, to be able to give a talk that I had scheduled months before.

The book of course evolved from that first time when I gave my talk – here in Cambria – reading from scribbles on yellow legal paper. The core of the book however poured out of me during those two days from a level of consciousness that was much higher than the one I was experiencing in my day to day life at that time.” – Joy to You & Me and Joy2MeU Update – August -2001

The official publication date of The Dance of Wounded Souls was January 1996, but I actually received the books from the printer on November 30, 1995. The book is perfect. There are maybe two or three places in the book that I might change a word or phrase, but other than that, it is perfect – which is not something I could have done by myself. I was guided to write that book. I was led to access the information. I was able to be open to remembering Truth and being used as an instrument to share the message.” – Attack on America – A Call for Higher Consciousness Chapter 6

Just reading my book will help most people to change their relationship with life for the better because it will cause a paradigm shift in consciousness. I understood the disease and the recovery process then – the telephone counseling has led me to refine and fine tune my ability to communicate the dynamics of the process to others.

In my own recovery process I was led intuitively, and through working the twelve steps, to develop the detachment that allowed me to learn how to start practicing discernment and to develop internal boundaries to facilitate my healing and growth. I wasn’t consciously aware of how important the concept of detachment specifically had been in my healing at the time I wrote the book – and don’t even mention the word in my book. I do describe the process and the importance of developing the observer perspective.

“We need to start observing ourselves and stop judging ourselves. Any time we judge and shame ourselves, we are feeding back into the disease, we are jumping back into the squirrel cage.”

What I see clearly now, is that detachment was the first step in my recovery – and is the key to consciousness raising. As long as we are reacting out of a polarized belief system to the feeling of toxic shame in our core relationship with ourselves, we are powerless to be co-creators of our lives in anything but a negative way. It is only by detaching from our inner process enough to start seeing reality from a new healthier perspective, that we can start to gain some freedom from our old wounds and old tapes.

Observing ourselves without shame and judgment allows us to see reality with more clarity. It creates the space that allows us to own our power to make choices. It creates the space for us to start to understand our own internal conflict so that we can choose to start paying attention to the “small quiet voice” of our Spirit, of our intuition, instead of giving power to the loud abusive messages coming from our wounded ego programming. It is the key to starting to stop the war within and create some inner peace.

Developing a level of consciousness in which we are self aware, and turning that space into a proactive force in changing our relationship with self and life, is the key to learning to relax and enJoy life in the moment some of the time. The percentage of the time we are be-ing and enjoying life will increase gradually as we transform our relationship with self and life.

Probably even more important than the ability to relax and enjoy life, is developing the observer consciousness that helps us to start developing some compassion for ourselves when we are not enjoying life. It helps us to allow – and align with – the emotional healing so that we can release the repressed grief energy we are carrying. It helps us to stop judging and shaming ourselves when we feel “bad.” That in turn means we spend less time in negative feeling emotional spaces – and move back into positive feeling emotional spaces sooner. It allows us to open up to receive so that we don’t sabotage feeling good.

Detachment allows us to start taking some Loving control of our own internal process. It allows us to start taking control over, and responsibility for, our thoughts and our feelings to the extent that is possible. It allows us to create a space in our lives to start learning how to be Loving to ourselves instead of feeling like a victim of self and life.

Detachment – learning to observe our selves so that we can become more conscious – is an act of Love.

“Our job is to pay attention to the best of our ability, to be conscious enough to pick up on the messages the Universe is sending our way, and to take action in the direction we feel is necessary. We need to suit up and show up for life today, and do what is in front of us – at the same time a part of us is observing how intricately and perfectly the process is unfolding.

God I Love this process!! It is so incredibly elaborate. A fascinating unfolding of an intricate mosaic. I can be an actor in the play – and at the same time, be the audience watching the story unfold. The audience part of my consciousness used to be booing and hissing, throwing tomatoes and yelling what a stupid loser I was. Now my audience is compassionate, understanding, and supportive – and even gives me a standing ovation once in a while.” – Newsletter Part 2 May 23, 2001 Update

additional level of consciousness

I realized after posting this page that I wasn’t sure if I had been clear that I was not talking about detachment as a way to avoid feeling the feelings. I am referring to developing an additional level of consciousness where we can be watching ourselves at the same time we are feeling the feelings. A level of consciousness from the adult on a Spiritual path, the recovery control center, that can help us align with the grieving process and release the emotional energy. We can be the recovering adult who is observing from a nurturing and Loving place at the same time we are experiencing the feelings of the 5 year old, or 9 year old, or 23 year old, or whatever. We can be in the feelings and observing ourselves grieving at the same time.

This level of consciousness is from a higher perspective. It is an additional level of consciousness that we cultivate and develop by more clearly tuning in to, concentrating our attention on, our intuition – the “small quiet voice” – and consciously choosing to give power to the Spiritual Truth we resonate with instead of our emotional truth and mental programming from childhood. By cultivating this detached perspective – detached from our ego experience of being human – we can observe both the mental and emotional levels of our being from a more discerning perspective. It facilitates changing the intellectual programming and taking some of the terror out of healing the emotional wounds. It allows us to set internal boundaries within, and between, the mental and emotional levels of our being.

When I speak of a detached observer perspective, I am not talking about the kind of observation that is taught in some spiritual meditation practices. Many people use that type of observation as a way to avoid feeling the feelings. That type of detachment from emotions is what some people experience on anti-depressants. Some people use chanting and meditation as anti-depressants. Chanting and meditation can be invaluable tools but applied in an imbalanced manner can, like positive affirmations, be used as tools to deny feelings.

Just observing the feelings does not heal them; does not fundamentally change our relationship patterns; does not make our fear of intimacy go away. We need to feel, experience, and release the emotional energy in order to heal the wounds and take power away from them.

We need to feel the feelings but learn how not to be the victim of them / of our reactions. I am talking about a detached observer consciousness that gives us the power to choose how to respond when one of our grief / rage buttons has been pushed. An emotional wound can be triggered and we can make a conscious choice that it is not safe to feel and release those feelings in that moment. Then, we have a choice about how we are going to respond in the now, and later we can do the grief work when it is safe and appropriate to do it.

We do not avoid feeling the feelings. We gain some power over when and where we feel the feelings. Detachment, as it applies to the inner child healing process in my approach, is a technique that fosters empowerment and response-ability, not emotional denial. Detachment is a dynamic technique, a method of consciously relating to our internal process, that is an integral and invaluable step in consciousness raising / enlightenment / awakening / recovery / healing / empowerment.” – Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The LightBook 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child HealingChapter 35 Co-Creation: Owning your Power to Manifest Love

Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light

Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The LightBook 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing is available through Joy2MeU.com It is also Available as eBook from Amazon or Barnes & Noble

Fear of intimacy is at the heart of codependency.We have a fear of intimacy because we have a fear of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection.We have a these fears because we were wounded in early childhood – we experienced feeling emotionally abandoned, rejected, and betrayed by our parents because they were wounded.They did not have healthy relationship with self – they were codependents who abandoned and betrayed themselves – and their behavior caused us to feel unworthy and unlovable.

“We exited the warm nurturing cocoon of our incubator into a cold, harsh world.A world run by Higher Powers (parents and any body else bigger than us – siblings, grandparents, hospital or orphanage personnel) who were wounded in their childhood.Gods who were not emotionally healthy, and did not know how to Love themselves.Our egos were traumatized – and adapted programming to try to protect us from the pain of emotional trauma that felt life threatening.

The people we Loved the most – our Higher Powers – hurt us the most. Our emotional intimacy issues were caused by, our fear of intimacy is a direct result of, our early childhood experiences.Our lives have been lived in reaction to the intellectual paradigms our egos adapted to deal with emotional trauma.

The part of a child’s brain that is logical and rational, that understands abstract concepts (like time or death), that can have any kind of an objective perspective on self or life, does not develop until about the age of 7 (the age of reason.)As little children we were completely ego-centric and magical thinking.We did not have the capacity to understand that our Higher Powers were not perfect.We watched their role modeling, experienced their behavior as personal, and felt the emotional currents of our environments – worry, frustration, resentment, fear, anger, pain, shame, etc. – and were emotionally traumatized.

Our ego adapted itself to the environment it was experiencing.It developed emotional and behavioral defense systems in reaction to the emotional pain we experienced growing up with parents who were wounded codependents.

If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to feel Spiritual in relationship to nature or animals, here is your answer.It was people who wounded us in childhood.It is people who our egos developed defense systems to protect us from.

I have told people for years, that the only reason to do inner child healing work is if we are going to interact with other people.If one is going to live in isolation on a mountain top meditating, it will be fairly easy to feel Spiritually connected.It is relating to other human beings that is messy.” – Reprogramming our ego defenses

Relating to animals or nature is safe because we will not be judged.Our pet will not abandon us because we are inherently defective.Nature will not reject us because we are personally shameful.People will – or at least it feels like that is what has happened in the past.

The Truth is that the ways that our parents treated us in childhood did not have anything to do with who we are – was not really personal.They were incapable of seeing themselves clearly.They certainly could not see us clearly – could not see our unique individuality from a perspective that allowed them to honor and respect us as beings separate from them. Their perspective of us was filtered through a prism of their own shame and woundedness.They projected their hopes and dreams, their fears and insecurities onto us.They saw us as the fix for their feelings of unworthiness, an extension of them that gave their life meaning – or perhaps they saw us as an inconvenience and a burden holding them back, preventing them from making their dreams come true.For some of us, a parent(s) was so caught up in their alcoholism or survival drama or career that most of the time they didn’t see us at all.

And both our parents and society taught us very clearly – through direct messages and role modeling – to be dishonest.Our parents taught us that keeping up appearances, worrying about what the neighbors think, was more important than our feelings – because it was so important to them.Or, some of us experienced a parent who went to the other extreme, where they acted like they didn’t care what anyone thought – which caused us to feel embarrassed and ashamed of their behavior because it was so out of balance, and caused us to worry about what the neighbors thought.They taught us to give power to other people by wearing masks and keeping secrets.

Even more importantly, our role models taught us to be emotionally dishonest.Because it wasn’t safe to be emotionally honest we lost our self – did not know how to be emotionally intimate with our self, and instead constructed a false self image to survive.We learned to wear different masks for different people.

As children we were incapable of seeing ourselves as separate from our families – of knowing we had worth as individuals apart from our families.The reality we grew up in was the only reality that we knew.We thought our parents behavior reflected our worth – the same way that our codependent parents thought our behavior was a factor in rather they had worth.

Codependence The Dance of Wounded Souls

“We live in a society where the emotional experience of “love” is conditional on behavior.Where fear, guilt, and shame are used to try to control children’s behavior because parents believe that their children’s behavior reflects their self-worth.

In other words, if little Johnny is a well-behaved, “good boy,” then his parents are good people.If Johnny acts out, and misbehaves, then there is something wrong with his parents.(“He doesn’t come from a good family.”)

What the family dynamics research shows is that it is actually the good child – the family hero role – who is the most emotionally dishonest and out of touch with him/herself, while the acting-out child – the scapegoat – is the most emotionally honest child in the dysfunctional family.Backwards again.

In a Codependent society we are taught, in the name of “love,” to try to control those we love, by manipulating and shaming them, to try to get them to do the right things – in order to protect our own ego-strength.Our emotional experience of love is of something controlling:“I love you if you do what I want you to do.”Our emotional experience of love is of something that is shaming and manipulative and abusive.

Love that is shaming and abusive is an insane, ridiculous concept.Just as insane and ridiculous as the concept of murder and war in the name of God.” – quotes in this color are fromCodependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

Rather our parents made us their reason for living – which is a form of toxic love in which the child is the drug of choice (causing a child to feel responsible for an adult’s self worth is emotionally incestuous and abusive);or a burden to be carried, the scapegoat they blamed for ruining their lives;or treated us like we were an inconvenience in the moments when they even seemed aware of us;it wounded us.We felt betrayed – by our own unworthiness, because we were incapable of knowing they were not perfect. We felt abandoned and rejected by the gods in our lives.

We were wounded in our first relationships with other people.We were tiny, innocent, little beings who were completely dependent upon wounded people who did not Love themselves – and therefore were incapable of Loving us in a healthy way.

Feeling unlovable to the gods in our lives as tiny children was life threatening.It felt life threatening.

Our fear of intimacy is based upon painful, traumatic experience.

in to me see

The simplest and most understandable way I have ever heard intimacy described is by breaking the word down: in to me see.That is what intimacy is about – allowing another person to see into us, sharing who we are with another person.

Sharing who we are is a problem for codependents because at the core of our relationship with ourselves is the feeling that we are somehow defective, unlovable and unworthy – because of our childhood emotional trauma.Codependency is rooted in our ego programming from early childhood.That programming is a defense that the ego adapted to help us survive.It is based upon the feeling that we are shameful, that we are defective, unworthy, and unlovable.Our codependent defense system is an attempt to protect us from being rejected, betrayed, and abandoned because of our unworthy, shameful being.

We have a fear of intimacy because we were wounded, emotionally traumatized, in early childhood – felt rejected and abandoned – and then grew up in emotional dishonest societies that did not provide tools for healing, or healthy role models to teach us how to overcome that fear.Our wounding in early childhood caused us to feel that something was wrong with our being – toxic shame – and our societal and parental role models taught us to keep up appearances, to hide our shamefulness from others.

Toxic Shame – defective, unlovable

It is very important in recovery to start making a distinction – drawing a boundary – between being and behavior.Growing up in dysfunctional societies taught us to equate our worth – and judge the worth of others – based upon external appearances. We experienced love as conditional on behavior.Someone who behaves badly – i.e. not the way we want them to – is a bad person.Someone who behaves the way we want them to is a good person.

It is very important to stop judging our worth based upon the dysfunctional standards of societies that taught us it was shameful to be imperfect human beings.

“When I use the term “judge,” I am talking about making judgments about our own or other people’s beings based on behavior.In other words, I did something bad therefore I am a bad person; I made a mistake therefore I am a mistake.That is what toxic shame is all about:feeling that something is wrong with our being, that we are somehow defective because we have human drives, human weaknesses, human imperfections.

There may be behavior in which we have engaged that we feel ashamed of but that does not make us shameful beings We may need to make judgments about whether our behavior is healthy and appropriate but that does not mean that we have to judge our essential self, our being, because of the behavior.Our behavior has been dictated by our disease, by our childhood wounds; it does not mean that we are bad or defective as beings.It means that we are human, it means that we are wounded.

It is important to start setting a boundary between being and behavior.All humans have equal Divine value as beings – no matter what our behavior.Our behavior is learned (and/or reactive to physical or physiological conditions).Behavior, and the attitudes that dictate behavior, are adopted defenses designed to allow us to survive in the Spiritually hostile, emotionally repressive, dysfunctional environments into which we were born.”

At the core of codependency is toxic shame – the feeling that we are somehow inherently defective, that something is wrong our being.

[And I want to make note here, that anytime I talk about shame, rather I use the adjective toxic or not – I am talking about feeling toxic shame in relationship to “being,” feeling personally defective.Some people in the field, notably John Bradshaw, make a distinction between toxic shame and healthy shame.I find it much simpler, and more useful, to use shame in reference to “being” and guilt in reference to behavior.I believe there is healthy and unhealthy guilt (as I talk about in Discernment in relationship to emotional honesty and responsibility 2) but any time I use the term shame I am talking about toxic shame.(The example that I have heard Bradshaw use of what he calls healthy shame, is that it is what keeps us from running down the street naked.I find that not only blatantly a judgment of behavior – but also based upon cultural standards that are not necessarily aligned with any kind of Spiritual Truth.Some of John’s Jesuit background showing I think. ;-)]

The emotional trauma we suffered in early childhood created within us the feeling of toxic shame.

“We do not need fixing.We are not broken.Our sense of self, our self perception, was shattered and fractured and broken into pieces, not our True Self.

We think and feel like we are broken because we were programmed backwards.

We are not broken.That is what toxic shame is – thinking that we are broken, believing that we are somehow inherently defective.

Guilt is “I made a mistake, I did something wrong.”

Shame is “I’m a mistake, something is wrong with me.”

Again, the feelings of that little child inside who believes that he/she deserves to be punished.”

At the foundation of our relationship with our self – and therefore with other people and life – is the feeling that we will die if we reveal ourselves to other people, because then they will see our shameful self.I felt deep within me (in those rare instances of breaking through my denial and blaming to a moment of honest clarity), that if I let anyone see who I really was, they would run away screaming in horror at the grotesque, deformed, shameful being that I was.

Our lives have been dictated by an emotional defense system that is designed to keep hidden the the false belief that we are defective.We use external things – success, looks, productivity, substances – to try to cover up, overcome, make up for, the personal defectiveness that we felt caused our hearts to be broken and our souls wounded in childhood.And that personal defectiveness is a lie.That feeling of toxic shame is a lie.

It was so painful that we had to lie to ourselves about it.We were forced to be emotionally and intellectually dishonest with ourselves by the codependent defenses we adapted.We had to learn how to live in denial of the pain and shame at the core of our relationship with ourselves.Codependency is a vicious form of Delayed Stress Syndrome, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Codependence as Delayed Stress Syndrome)The emotional trauma caused us to disassociate – to not be present in our own skins in a conscious way – and to rationalize and deny our emotional experience of life.We built up a dishonest self image to try to convince ourselves that we had worth based upon some comparative external factors:looks, success, independence (the counterdependent rebel), popularity (people pleasers), righteousness (better than others, right to their wrong), or whatever.That false self image was not completely dishonest because it was formed in reaction to some basic aspects of who we Truly are – but it was a twisted, distorted, polarized perspective of our self adapted in response to toxic shame for the purpose of giving us some ego strength, some reason we could feel better than others.

That false self image, the masks we learned to wear, is something we invested a lot of energy into convincing ourselves was the truth.But deep inside, in our moments of insight and clarity, we knew we were hiding a shameful secret.Often we got that toxic shame about our being confused in our memories with some behavior in our childhood that felt shameful.It is very common for us to have a secret that involves a way in which we were abused – physically, sexually, etc. – that we go to great pains to avoid because we associate the feeling of toxic shame with that incident and think it was our fault.

We do not want other people to see in to us, because then they will learn our shameful secret.We have a fear of intimacy because of the false belief that our relationship with our self is based upon.

We have spent our lives trying to protect ourselves from a lie about who we are.We have spent incredible energy in our lives trying to keep the toxic shame hidden.The secret that is killing us and has made our lives miserable, the secret we have lived in reaction to – is a lie.We have been compulsively – because we were reacting to what felt like a threat to survival – living our lives in reaction to our need to keep secret who we feel we really are in the deepest part of our being.

“Because as small children we did not have any perspective or discernment (prior to the age of reason, which occurs about 7 as our brains develop) we were incapable as viewing our parents as anything other than perfect Higher Powers.Our God and Goddess.Because our Higher Powers were wounded and did not know how to Love self, we were wounded and got the message that something must be wrong with us.Toxic Shame.

That shame is toxic and is not ours – it never was!We did nothing to be ashamed of – we were just little kids.Just as our parents were little kids when they were wounded and shamed, and their parents before them, etc., etc.This is shame about being human that has been passed down from generation to generation.

There is no blame here, there are no bad guys, only wounded souls and broken hearts and scrambled minds.

Out of our codependent relationship with life, there are only two extremes: blame them, or blame me.Buy into the belief that they are to blame for what I am feeling – or I am to blame because I am a shameful unworthy being. The emotional pain of feeling unlovable to our parents – which is a reflection of unbearable anguish of feeling separated from The Source – can feel like a bottomless pit of agonizing suffering. At the core of our wounding is the unbearable emotional pain resulting from having internalized the message that God – our Source – does not Love us because we are personally defective and shameful.

Our addictions, compulsions, and obsessions;our continuing quest to reach the destination, to find the fix;our inability to be present in the now through worrying about the future or ruminating about the past;are all tools that we used to avoid the emotional pain.Our behavior patterns and dysfunctional relationships (of all kinds, with other people, with money, with our gender and sexuality) are symptoms.Codependence is a defense system that was adapted by our damaged egos to try to avoid falling into the abyss of shame and pain within.

Because of the feeling that we were somehow shameful, were unworthy and unlovable, we adapted defenses to protect us.Those defenses caused us to keep recreating the emotional dynamics of our childhood.

Repeating Behavior Patterns – looking for love in all the wrong places

Codependence is doubly traumatic.We were traumatized as children – and the defenses we adapted to protect us caused us to traumatize ourselves as adults.We have experienced getting our hearts broken, our hopes and dreams shattered, again and again.We abandoned, betrayed, and set ourselves up to feel rejected over and over again.(Even those “family hero” types who achieve external “success” and financial abundance have to keep running from distraction to distraction and finding someone to blame so that they can deny the hole they feel within themselves.Achieving some material success makes it much easier to maintain the illusion of ego control and stay in denial of one’s wounded soul.Being rich and famous can be a huge block to true emotional intimacy.)

As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns.We keep getting involved with unavailable people.We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected.We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces.Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?

“Codependence is an emotional and behavioral defense system which was adopted by our egos in order to meet our need to survive as a child.Because we had no tools for reprogramming our egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met – our emotional, mental, Spiritual, or physical needs.Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside.Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves.

Some people, when they first get into Recovery, when they first start on a healing path, mistakenly believe that they are supposed to take down their defenses and learn to trust everyone.That is a very dysfunctional belief.It is necessary to take down the dysfunctional defense systems but we have to replace them with defenses that work.We have to have a defense system, we have to be able to protect ourselves. There is still a hostile environment out there full of wounded Adult Children whom it is not safe to trust.

In our disease defense system we build up huge walls to protect ourselves and then – as soon as we meet someone who will help us to repeat our patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation – we lower the drawbridge and invite them in.We, in our Codependence, have radar systems which cause us to be attracted to, and attract to us, the people, who for us personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever we need to repeat our patterns) individuals – exactly the ones who will “push our buttons.”

This happens because those people feel familiar.Unfortunately in childhood the people whom we trusted the most – were the most familiar – hurt us the most.So the effect is that we keep repeating our patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust ourselves or other people

Once we begin healing we can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as we are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of our childhoods.Once we start Recovering, then we can begin to see that on a Spiritual level these repeating behavior patterns are opportunities to heal the childhood wounds.

The process of Recovery teaches us how to take down the walls and protect ourselves in healthy ways – by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them.It teaches us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and Loving in meeting our own needs.(Of course many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.)”

As children we were victims – as adult we kept repeating the behaviors we learned as children – in one extreme or the other.The people in our lives were actors we unconsciously cast in roles that would recreate our childhood wounding so that we could try to heal it – try to get in right this time.We were energetically drawn to, and attracted to us, the people who would treat us in ways that felt familiar – because on some deep level we believed that is what we deserved.If our own parents could not love us, then we must not deserve to be loved.

In my Update Newsletter for October 2000, I talked about a mother and daughter that I had done some work with. After an initial period of intensive counseling for both of them, we had evolved into counseling sessions several times a year with one or both of them as they had opportunities for growth in their recovery. The week that I was writing this article, I had a session with the mother.Her daughter had once again engaged in behavior that was dangerous and life threatening.She was very upset about an incident that her daughter had experienced – and was putting a lot of energy into blaming the daughter’s boyfriend.

She kept saying how controlling, possessive, and abusive this boyfriend was and how she just couldn’t understand it.She felt that her daughter had chosen the boyfriend over her own mother and out of the deep hurt she was feeling she was blaming.She mentioned several times how she had said to her daughter, “What is wrong with you!” Then she would swing to the other extreme and say, “Maybe I failed somehow as a parent.”She was caught up in codependent polarized reaction to her fear, pain, and shame.

After letting her vent for a long period of time, I brought her back to focusing on her Spiritual belief system and applying the Serenity prayer to what was happening.I reminded her that the reason her daughter was in a relationship that was controlling, possessive, and abusive was because that was the only type of relationship the daughter was familiar with.I reminded her that she, in her concern and love for her daughter, out of her fear of her daughters self destructive behavior, had been controlling, possessive, and abusive.I pointed out that it was abusive to say something like, “what is wrong with you.” – because it equates behavior with being.Doing something “wrong” does not mean there is something wrong with us.The daughter was in fact, just repeating her codependent patterns – and to me, her behavior was not only understandable, but very predictable.(And repeating the patterns was not a sign that she had not grown.This was a new opportunity for growth at a higher level of consciousness for her – a perfect part of her growth process, not some regression or slip into old behavior.We make progress gradually.)

Once I got her to stop reacting to her shame, fear, and hurt, and to stop viewing the situation from a polarized black and white, right and wrong, perspective – then she was able to get back to her recovery and start using the tools she has learned to help her let go of things she can’t control and focus on her inner process which she can have some degree of control over in a Loving way.

The reality of codependence is that we get in relationship with people who feel familiar – people who will repeat our childhood emotional dynamics.We keep getting involved with people with whom we can recreate the emotional dynamics from our childhood in some way.

A large part of the tragedy of codependency – the insidiously dysfunctional nature of the disease – is that by repeating the patterns we keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned and rejected.To feel betrayed by our own unworthiness.To reinforce the lie that we are inherently, and personally, shameful and unlovable.

“I spent most of my life being the victim of my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own behaviors.I was consistently picking untrustworthy people to trust and unavailable people to love.I could not trust my own emotions because I was incapable of being honest with myself emotionally – which made me incapable of Truly being honest on any level.”

We are attracted to people who are unable to meet our needs, who are unavailable on some level, as a protection from allowing ourselves to get close to someone who could be available to us – because then they would find out how shameful we are and reject us.Allowing someone to see into us, to see who we really are, feels to the disease like the last thing we want to do – and it generates incredible fear of allowing that kind of intimacy.

Codependency is an emotional and behavioral defense system that does not work.Our defense against pain and shame actually creates more pain – and causes us to keep repeating painful patterns in a way which reinforces the belief that we are somehow defective, that we have good reason to feel ashamed of ourselves.

Our fear of intimacy is reinforced by the evidence of how many “stupid” choices we have made in the past.Our experiences in childhood caused us to fear intimacy and feel that we were somehow unlovable – and our codependency caused us to keep creating new evidence of our inherent defectiveness.

Nasty stuff indeed!

We have a fear of intimacy for very good reasons.We have a lifetime of experiences that reinforce the original messages – that reinforces our feeling of being terrified of letting anyone get too close to us, see into us.

The only way to overcome our fear of intimacy is to get into recovery for our codependency – and do our inner child healing work so that we can learn to be emotionally honest and intimate with ourselves.Integrating a Loving Spiritual belief system into our relationship with self and life is an invaluable step in taking power away from the toxic shame so that we can start to Love ourselves and be open to being Loved by others.

“Learning what healthy behavior is will allow us to be healthier in the relationships that do not mean much to us;intellectually knowing Spiritual Truth will allow us to be more Loving some of the time;but in the relationships that mean the most to us, with the people we care the most about, when our “buttons are pushed” we will watch ourselves saying things we don’t want to say and reacting in ways that we don’t want to react – because we are powerless to change the behavior patterns without dealing with the emotional wounds.

We cannot integrate Spiritual Truth or intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into our experience of life in a substantial way without honoring and respecting the emotions.We cannot consistently incorporate healthy behavior into day to day life without being emotionally honest with ourselves.We cannot get rid of our shame and overcome our fear of emotional intimacy without going through the feelings.”

“The key to healing our wounded souls is to get clear and honest in our emotional process.Until we can get clear and honest with our human emotional responses – until we change the twisted, distorted, negative perspectives and reactions to our human emotions that are a result of having been born into, and grown up in, a dysfunctional, emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment – we cannot get clearly in touch with the level of emotional energy that is Truth.We cannot get clearly in touch with and reconnected to our Spiritual Self.

We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great Spirit.But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted, distorted attitudes and false beliefs.

We can intellectually throw out false beliefs.We can intellectually remember and embrace the Truth of ONENESS and Light and Love.But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our day-to-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds.Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.”

Logo of Joy2MeU.com website of Robert Burney

Codependency causes us to feel like the victim of our own thoughts and feelings, and like our own worst enemy – recovery helps us to start learning how to be our own best friend. Getting into codependency recovery is an act of love for self. Reading my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls (links to all of my books in ebook format are on that page) would really help you take your understanding to a whole new level. Understanding codependency is vital in helping us to forgive our self for the dysfunctional ways we have lived our lives – it is not our fault we are codependent.

In the last few years I have also published two more books that can be very helpful. Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light Book 1 Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing and Romantic Relationships ~ The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth. I have special offers for either or both of these books (or for all three of my books) on this page.